Angeles

Angeles began in 1796, when Ángel Pantaleón de Miranda and his wife Rosalía de Jesús cleared a settlement in the forest at the edge of San Fernando's territory. It was named Culiat after a vine that grew there and later renamed for the founder and for the town's patrons, the Holy Angels. The brick parish church was built between 1877 and 1896, and a small class of Kapampangan landowners put up the ancestral houses that still stand around it. In 1899, as the First Philippine Republic retreated northwards, Angeles briefly served as its capital, and Emilio Aguinaldo marked the first anniversary of the declaration of independence at the Pamintuan house.

The American period changed everything. In 1903 the United States established a cavalry post on land beside the town that became Clark Field and then Clark Air Base, and the settlement grew around its gates. The Japanese took the base in 1942 and used it until American forces returned in 1945. During the Cold War Clark became the largest American military installation outside the United States, a city of tens of thousands of personnel, and the economy of Angeles — housing, services, bars and restaurants along Fields Avenue — shaped itself entirely around that traffic.

Two events ended the arrangement. The Philippine Senate voted in 1991 not to renew the bases agreement, and in June of the same year Mount Pinatubo, about 25 kilometres to the west, erupted and buried Clark and much of Pampanga under ash and lahar. The Americans withdrew, the local economy collapsed, and lahar flows continued to bury towns for years afterwards. The base was reopened as the Clark Freeport Zone, the runways became a civilian airport, and the city rebuilt around aviation, business-process offices, tourism and its reputation for food.

Angeles is thoroughly Kapampangan, and in Pampanga that identity is expressed first through cooking. The province regards itself as the culinary capital of the country, and households judge each other on their kare-kare and their cured meats; a cook of reputation is a person of standing. Food festivals, cooking competitions and the city's own sisig celebration are civic occasions rather than tourist events.

Catholic practice is intense and public. Holy Week brings chanted readings of the passion, called pabasa, in neighbourhood chapels through the night, processions of images owned by particular families, and the penitential rites — self-flagellation and, in a few places nearby, crucifixion — that Pampanga is known for and that the church discourages. December belongs to the parol, the star lantern, which the province turned into an art of rotating lights and which fills the streets from the beginning of Advent.

The long American presence left another layer: baseball and basketball, a strong tradition of live cover bands, bakeries selling hot dogs and pastries beside Kapampangan stalls, and a mixed community of Filipino-Americans, retired servicemen and, more recently, Korean residents and students. Kapampangan, Tagalog, English and Korean are all heard within a few streets, and the city is used to foreigners in a way few provincial cities are.

About 480,000 people live in the city, which is one of the larger urban centres of Central Luzon and effectively continuous with the neighbouring towns of Mabalacat and Porac. Most live away from the freeport in the dense barangays along the highway, while the freeport itself holds offices, hotels and industrial estates rather than much housing.

The economy rests on the freeport and the airport. Clark employs tens of thousands in aviation, logistics, manufacturing, outsourcing offices and casinos, and the government's plans for Central Luzon treat it as a second hub for the capital region. Tourism supplies the rest: the entertainment district, Pinatubo tours, conventions and a steady flow of foreign residents and retirees. Farming and food production continue in the surrounding towns, and remittances from Kapampangans abroad support many households.

The day starts early, with jeepneys full before six and bakeries selling pan de sal at dawn, and slows through the hot afternoon before the evening trade begins. Traffic on MacArthur Highway, flooding when the monsoon is heavy, and the long process of clearing lahar-choked rivers are constant local concerns. The eruption is still a living memory: people date events by it, and the grey sand under the fields west of the city is a reminder of how recent it is.

Pampanga's reputation rests on dishes that take trouble, and Angeles claims the most famous of them. Sisig in its modern form — pig's face and ears boiled, grilled, chopped fine and served sizzling on a cast-iron plate with onion, calamansi and chilli, often topped with an egg — was popularised here in the 1970s by the cook Lucia Cunanan, and has since become one of the country's signature dishes.

The rest of the Kapampangan table is wider than that. Kare-kare, oxtail and vegetables in a thick peanut sauce, is eaten with bagoong shrimp paste. Bringhe is a rice dish cooked with coconut milk and turmeric in a banana leaf, a relative of paella. Tocino, sweet cured pork, and longganisa sausages are provincial specialities sold in every market, and buro, rice fermented with fish or shrimp and served with vegetables and fried fish, is the acquired taste that Kapampangans defend most fiercely. Sinigang, adobo and grilled bangus appear as everywhere, but the seasoning is more careful.

Sweets are a serious business too: turrones de casuy, cashew marzipan wrapped in edible wafer, tibok-tibok, a carabao-milk pudding, and the rice cakes eaten at dawn in December after the Simbang Gabi masses. The American years added steakhouses, bakeries and a taste for breakfasts of eggs and sausage, and Korean restaurants now line parts of Balibago, so a single street can offer buro, barbecue and a bakery within a few doors.