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Heaven on a Stick


I stepped outside a climbing gym's party last night for a few minutes, and espied a fond and familiar sight: a fishball vendor!

I have loved those little deep-fried pieces of piscine-flavored batter (cornstarch and flaked fish according to a recipe) since I was knee-high and strictly forbidden to buy the stuff off the streets. Then again, I've never been one to listen to the "You can't" command, which I guess explains my predilection for fried fishballs and reckless stunts. At any rate, the parental injunction was not without sound basis: it wasn't the fishballs per se that were the problem, it was the sauce. Those three magical and mysterious jars of sweet, sour, and spicy condiments of varying degrees of heat were potential breeding grounds of nasty transmittable diseases, such as hepatitis or cholera. In fact, a friend of mine from law school came down with a bad case of hepatitis A just as the Bar exams were underway - fishball sauce being the culprit. Wait, that's an unjust accusation; it's not the actual sauce that's to blame, it's the abonimable phenomenon of the *shudder*... double dip!

And thus it was with some trepidation that I approached the unfamiliar vendor - I only usually get my hit on the UP campus where sauce sanitation is zealously guarded by vendors armed with slotted spoons. But the temptation was too much to resist, even if I did find out much later (after single-dipping and ingesting two and half sticks' worth) that Manong Fishball also peddled his goodies on campus and observed the requisite sanitary standards.

So anyway, I had a fine time conversing with the toothless vendor about the economy of scale, the rising prices of gas and fishballs (50 centavos each!), and the peculiar physique of rockclimbers. By the time I left the party, and as I'd foretold, he'd gone home, his stock and sauces sold out.

I think will never make fishballs from scratch because, though the recipe seems fairly simple, you can get a big bag to stuff yourself with for a little more than PhP50 (US$1.20) at the nearest Filipino supermarket or Asian grocery store. I like the good old fishballs - those slightly squashed grayish discs - as opposed to the modern pristine-white squid or cuttlefish balls, or, good grief, those nasty chicken balls. And I personally enjoy the balls fried to a crisp, dipped once in sweet-spicy dip and a second time in the vinegar-chili-onion jar. The only thing that used to suck about eating fishballs at home was that I couldn't quite replicate the sauce (maybe I couldn't quite get the right proportion of bacteria or virii? Heh heh), but today I hit paydirt after just one try. No need for two sauces with this one; it came out exactly the way I like it, just as if I had it off the street. Even the household help, who I fried up a whole batch for, couldn't stop saying "yumm."

Fishball sauce, street-style, here.

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