DAGUPAN CITY -- Between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. on weekdays, Litlit Decena and her elder sister, Flor, make their way to the office of the newspaper The Sunday Punch at the second floor of the Florencia Duque Building here to peddle to employees a native cake called kinerel.
Jocelyn de la Cruz, the paper's production head, mother of three, pops out of her air-conditioned room to get some of the delicacy. She, however, does not want kinerel for snack all the time.
Recently, she asked Litlit, "Don't you have deremen for a change?"
"Yes, we have, Atchi. It is with Nanay, who is waiting for us downstairs,” Litlit quickly replied before heading downstairs.
"What is deremen and what makes it different from kinerel?" we asked Flor when we were at The Punch’s office during snack time.
To our surprise, she said deremen comes out plenty during Undas, when the living remember their dear departed kin.
"Kinerel, which is made of flour shaped like a small ball with slices of cassava and saba banana, cooked in rich coconut milk, is available on any occasion and any season," she said. "Deremen on the other hand, is available only once a year." That would be after the rice harvesting season.
Then Litlit returned with the deremen, which is colored black and costs PHP40 each, a special bargain for the newspaper’s staff, including us.
We were told by the Decena sisters that deremen is made of glutinous rice from grains that are picked stalk by stalk.
“If you want to make deremen, you hold the stalks and put the grains in a fire. Once through, you gather the blackened grains and sift the remainder, then put them in a mortar and pound them with a wooden pestle,” Flor said.
It is more difficult to make deremen than kinerel, said Litlit, but her Nanay does it with ease as she has been making it since she was a child in Mangaldan.
Once the blackened grains are ready, the deremen is cooked in coconut milk, and sweetened with molasses.
To avoid the strenuous process of preparing the grains, one may just buy the blackened glutinous rice sold in the markets of Dagupan.
The glutinous rice, which comes all the way from the rice-producing towns of Mangaldan, Calasiao, Sta. Barbara, Sual and Mangatarem, are not only for deremen but also for other native cakes that Pangasinan is known for -- tupig, latik, suman, and kalamay, among others.
Deremen abounds during the harvest season in Pangasinan, as many farmers plant glutinous rice, which costs more than the ordinary grains.
As the Undas tradition dictates, deremen is usually placed at the altar of every Catholic household as a food offering for the departed.
Old folks say that before the deremen could ever get into the mouth of the living, the dead must get it first. This is why, as a tradition, the rice cake is placed at the altar before the saints, usually before people go the cemetery to pay their respects to their dead.
Upon their return from the cemetery, the living could then partake of the deremen at the dining table.
It is said that Pangasinan’s deremen has already traveled to many places and even overseas, where it has taken different shapes and colors. It is even served to guests in classy hotels, but luckily, it has retained its name.
But Pangasinenses, even those who have moved to other countries, are still dying to see and eat the original deremen, the one their dear great grandparents labored to prepare and cook during their younger years to commemorate Undas. (PNA)
