Roscas (Filipino cuisine)
| Type | Cookie, pastry, biscuit |
|---|---|
| Course | snack, dessert |
| Place of origin | Philippines |
| Region or state | Leyte and Samar |
| Main ingredients | lard, anise, flour, sugar, butter, and egg yolks |
| Variations | with tuba palm wine as liqueur ingredient |
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In Philippine cuisine, roscas refers to a pastry cookie from the province of Leyte, mainly from the towns of Barugo and Carigara, made from lard, anise, flour, sugar, butter, and eggs. A blog has noted that tuba (the local coconut red-colored palm wine) is also one of the Leyte roscas' ingredients.
While some claim that this pasalubong pastry cookie traces its history to the Spanish era (and has been so called because of its shape that makes it appear like an elbow plumbing part), others have indicated that roscas-making in Leyte was started in the town of Barugo by a returning migrant in the late 1960s whose success was replicated in the nearby town of Carigara and the far town of Calbayog in Samar province.
Filipino pop semiotician Jojo Soria de Veyra has pointed out in his art magazine that, in comparing the Leyte roscas (singular) with its Spanish and Portuguese and Latin American namesake (plural), each of Leyte's roscas' pieces would not really be a "rosca" (or ring) but only half of a rosca or ring. After this realization, he wrote, Filipinos can now go on to consider potential romantic meanings for the pastry pieces, citing the joined or completed rings in The Lord of the Rings and Shazzan.
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Wikipedia