IT was fiesta on National Heroes Day in the small community where I live. The date was chosen not because of a patron saint?s feast as in most towns, but because my family resides in Heroes Hill, Quezon City.

The heroes commemorated by street names are not those of Bonifacio?s era but those who fought valiantly in World War II. Hence, most of the streets bear soldiers? names but the main street is named after the distinguished Jose Abad Santos. Having no particular saint to mark our fiesta makes our place unique.

Our neighboring barangay, in contrast, celebrates its fiesta every Easter Sunday. The night before, like clockwork, there is a singing contest that doesn?t allow anyone in the vicinity to enjoy a good night?s sleep. In the morning, the band starts playing around the place.

The band also signals the beginning of our fiesta, a troop composed of young girls and boys from a local school nearby. It is one of the activities planned by the neighborhood association. The others include the standard happenings in most fiestas. Mass is said at the community chapel where residents come in their Sunday finery. Vendors flock from everywhere to sell their wares. The weirdest items on sale are chicks with their feathers dyed in outrageous neon colors.

While there is some partaking of food as provided by volunteers in the community, individual homes don?t open their gates to everyone the way they used to. It is a sign that neighbors don?t really know each other, unlike in the past.

It?s the same these days even in the provinces. For years, in my husband?s hometown, his parents? home was open to anyone who walked in during the feast of St. Joseph. But then they knew who everyone was, even a friend of a friend. These days, it?s prudent to ask everyone whose guest the stranger is.

At the Fiesta of Our Lady of Candelaria in Jaro, Iloilo, some homes had security guards whose job was to ask guests whose house they were entering. The magic word was the owner?s name but that only got you past the first sentry at the gate. The second guard was a long time houseboy who knew everyone and who led everybody past the front door.

Fiesta food

What is served on the fiesta table has also changed. A friend who belongs to one of the old families in Pampanga laments going to his hometown only to be fed Japanese gyoza and sashimi. Where is the morcon, asado and menudo, he asked me. He was raring to taste once more dishes he couldn?t get in Manila, to bring back memories of his grandmother?s cooking during the fiesta.

I told him there are different perceptions now of what is special cooking. At the fiesta, hosts want to show off what cannot be had every day. It?s no longer what and how many dishes can be cooked if you slaughter one pig or cow.

The most unusual fiesta I?ve heard of happens every Good Friday in Bantayan, an island off Cebu. The place has a special dispensation that enables homes to serve lechon on the day of fasting and abstinence.

In the Leyte hometown, the tomato-based dishes were always there, such as menudo and caldereta. I liked the chuletas, the spare ribs that were battered and then fried. And the deathless humba, a variation on the pork adobo but mixed in with peanuts and salted black beans and where the fat jiggled after being cooked slowly for a long time.

But because my husband went home only once a year, he wanted seafood as well. Since market day was only once a week, he would go to the next town where the market was daily and the fish came in direct from the sea. So the fiesta food would have grilled tanguigue, sweet-and-sour lapu-lapu, boiled shrimps and kinilaw of tanguigue as well.

It?s not usual to have seafood on the table because these can be had daily but the people from Manila had to have what is special to them, those expensive fish and crustaceans. There was one time when I cooked my signature dish, crabs fried and then cooked in ginger sauce. A fiesta is also when you can show off what you can do very well.

Whenever I go to the regions to ask people about their cooking, the initial answers are always about fiesta food. It?s to let me know they can cook these special dishes, those that take long to prepare, require expensive ingredients and need a good cook, sometimes a professional to make it worthy of the fiesta table.

Today, a professional sometimes belongs to a catering business which is the other change one notices during feasts.

The fiesta menu is now determined by what the caterer can do.

If they don?t do humba you don?t get it. Sometimes I can tell what?s underneath those chaffing dishes even before they are opened?a sort of roast beef with mashed potatoes or roast chicken, fried fish fillet with tartar sauce or fish steak with beefsteak sauce with onions and then some form of paella.

With those usual offerings, nothing is special anymore.

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