The cooking method for the Philippine
adobo is indigenous to the Philippines. The various
precolonial peoples of the Philippine archipelago often cooked or prepared their food with vinegar and salt in various techniques to
preserve them in the
tropical climate. Vinegar, in particular, is one of the most important ingredients in Filipino cuisine, with the main traditional types being
coconut,
cane,
nipa palm, and
kaong palm. These are all linked to traditional
alcohol fermentation. There are four main traditional cooking methods using vinegar in the Philippines:
kiniláw (raw seafood in vinegar and spices),
paksíw (a broth of meat with vinegar and spices),
sangkutsá (pre-cooked
braising of meat in vinegar and spices), and finally
adobo (a stew of vinegar, garlic, salt/soy sauce, and other spices). When the
Spanish Empire colonized the Philippines in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, they encountered the
adobo cooking process. It was first recorded in the 1613 dictionary
Vocabulario de la lengua tagala compiled by the Spanish
Franciscan missionary,
Pedro de San Buenaventura. He referred to it as
adobo de los naturales ("
adobo of the native [peoples]"). The Spanish also applied the term
adobo to any native dish that was marinated before consumption. However, the concept of cooking
adobo already existed long before the arrival of the Spanish in 1521. In the 1794 edition of the
Vocabulario, it was applied to
quilauìn (
kinilaw) a related but different dish which also primarily uses vinegar. In the 1711
Visayan dictionary
Vocabulario de la lengua Bisaya, the term
guinamus (verb form:
gamus) was used to refer to any kind of marinades (
adobo), from fish to pork. Other terms for precolonial
adobo-like dishes among the
Visayan peoples are
dayok and
danglusi. In modern Visayan,
guinamós and
dayok refer to separate dishes. Dishes prepared with vinegar, garlic, salt (later soy sauce), and other spices eventually came to be known solely as
adobo, with the original term for the dish now lost to history. ==Description==