Pancit Malabon

There are many versions of the pancit Malabon.  The Pascual family of that town serve the noodles, called Bihon sariwa, and the mixtures, called Sahog, separate.  There would be two kilos of fresh shrimps, the dark variety called swahe, still jumping when bought.  There would be pork cubes, tinapa(smoked fish) that was just bought and then shredded, newly cooked chicharon which was pounded to bits, and sliced native pechay.

It is the sauce, called the Palabok, which distinguishes one pancit Malabon from another.  The sauce is all-important which is why the noodle dish is also known as pancit palabok.  The sauce is usually made of shrimp stock, a dozen egg yolks, a little bit of achuete, some starch for a thicker consistency, and of course, the best patis and some calamansi for flavoring.



The old way Pancit Malabon was made was quite different.  It had no palabok, just the sahog, the noodles cooked with oil from pork fat and colored with achuete.  In the old days also, the luglug was eaten in a small soup bowl called a mangkok, the kind the Chinese use as rice bowl.  These days, the pancit is almost always served in bigger Western style soup bowls.  The bowl may be all that remains of the Chinese influence because there used to be a time when the pancit was eaten with bamboo chopsticks the called "sipit".  Another surprising trivia was a side dish known as balubad that was supposed to neutralize the taste of the rich palabok sauce or as the Tagalogs would put it, "pampaalis ng suya". It was doubly surprising to find out that balubad is the yellow fruit of the casuy.

Pansit luglug is another name for pancit Malabon because the noodles are dipped with a bamboo strainer into boiling stock and the action is called "niluluglug". The luglug is usually eaten with kamachile cookies, a dry kind of cookie with a slight buttery taste so called because it is shaped like the kamachile fruit.