Sweetness has always been one of our ways of enduring. It arrives in many forms in Filipino kitchens: rice coaxed into chewiness with coconut milk, sugarcane boiled into molasses, bananas fried until their edges curl crisp. Across towns and regions, that sweetness gathers under the single name of kalamay. Sticky, rewarding, consoling. It’s the kind of food you’ll find both at a wake and on a fiesta table, meant to steady the heart as much as fill the stomach.
In Marinduque, where I grew up, the word pointed to something simple. Magluto ka ng kalamay meant banana fritters. Saba bananas sliced and fanned, dipped in a thin batter, and dropped into hot oil until golden. That was kalamay to my grandmother, to neighbors, to me. The smell of frying bananas clung to our kitchen walls, with the sound of bubbling oil splashing on the wall and I never thought to question it.
But later I learned the word could hold other shapes too. On the island, we have kalamayhati, coconut jam stirred for hours until dark and glossy; kalamay ube, violet rice cakes topped with peanuts; kalamay dampa, triangular sweets capped with coconut curds. They looked nothing like the kalamay fritters, yet they all carried kalamay in their name. As a child, I wondered what magic word could enfold such varied delicacies. What bound them together to share one name?
The answer, I gather, lies in both language and tradition. In Tagalog, the word kalamay has an older, deeper meaning: “kalamayin ang loob”, to steady one’s heart. An exhortation to stay calm, take heart. I used to hear this at funerals, during the “lamay” – the overnight vigil for the dead where grieving loved ones are encouraged to be steadfast.
So it makes sense that all our kalamay delicacies are meant to comfort. At every vigil, there was always food and drink to comfort the mourners, coffee, maybe some bread or kakanin. Something sweet to soften the bitterness of grief. In this light, kalamay the food and kalamay the verb don’t seem coincidental at all. Both speak to soothing the spirit, one through the belly, the other through words.
Each kalamay is essentially put together, whether the banana fritters or a combination of coconut milk and sugar, all are slowly coaxed into union until it transforms into a sweet, sticky whole.
Marinduque’s three other kalamay variations fit this definition well. The kalamayhati is a jar of thick coconut jam, dark and glossy from hours of stirring coconut milk and matamis na bao over a flame that you can slather on suman. It used to be that our town had plenty of sugarcane fields and my ninang’s family runs a ligiran ng tubo and makes kalamayhati for selling at the market. I used to watch how they stirred and stirred the molasses in the big blackened kawa until it almost felt like the glinting caramel was calling me to swim on it. It was an enchanting thing to watch. And more than that, the smell of sugarcane ran on for miles and miles, calling on whoever passes by the clearing amidst the tubuhan. Then there’s kalamay ube, a flat violet cake made of sticky rice, cassava, and ube, topped with peanuts and sold at the Sunday market. It paired well with our town’s version of dinuguan called “kari-kari,” an offal dish cooked in pig’s blood and coconut cream. On occasional Sundays, my mother would come home with a small bilao of it. We’d gather for merienda, and the adults would eat it with tea or coffee. Much rarer is the ultimate treat for kids, the kalamay dampa, a triangle-shaped brown gooey sweet made of rice flour, coconut milk, and sugar topped with coconut curds. If, by the grace of God, it fell into our laps, my siblings and I would fight for it, eating as fast as we could, not even pausing to drink water so we could one-up each other. All these kalamay varieties looked and tasted different, yet they all shared the name ‘kalamay.’
The word itself traces further back, to Austronesian roots. In Visayan languages like Hiligaynon, kalamay simply means “sugar.” This hints that what defines kalamay is its sweetness, the sugar that holds everything together. A 1754 Spanish-Tagalog dictionary compiled by Spanish friars defined calamay as a “conserva de miel y harina” – a preserve of honey and flour – noting it could be “sticky” or “chewy.”
But long before the friars wrote it down, our ancestors were making it. Kindred treats across Southeast Asia still exist. The Iban people have a rice cake called “kelami”, and Malaysians make a toffee-like cake they call “kelamai.” We are part of that old, patient tradition of turning grain, coconut, and sweetener into food that endures. Our Filipino kalamay is part of this ancient heritage of sweetness.
Over time, each region in the Philippines put its own spin on kalamay, and the word became a common thread in our culinary vocabulary. In Luzon, Antipolo kalamay is a dense, chewy rice cake sold in banana-leaf disks, topped with coconut curds. In Bulacan, sticky brown slices are wrapped in banana leaves for town fiestas. Cavite’s Indang boasts kalamay buna, a sticky blend of glutinous rice, coconut milk, and panutsa . Even our neighboring island, Mindoro, has its own version of kalamay, rich with coconut and a whisper of peanut butter and vanilla.
The most iconic, though, might be Bohol’s kalamay, so thick and gummy it’s traditionally poured into halved coconut shells, then sealed with red papel de japon. Tourists crack them open like treasure chests, scooping out the golden sweetness inside. It shares a name with Marinduque’s kalamay-hati, literally “half kalamay,” though the similarity ends at the shell. One is jam, the other kakanin. Both are beloved.
In Baguio, a similar treat takes a more irreverent form. Sundot kulangot, literally “pick a booger,” are tiny balls of kalamay sold in miniature shells you poke open and eat with a stick.
From coconut shells to thimble-sized pods, kalamay finds a vessel. But not even geography can contain its essence. Everywhere, it’s the same comforting sweetness that people reach for.
When we prepared for a town fiesta or a family padasal , the elders would often include some form of kalamay on the menu. In one of Doreen Fernandez’s writings on Filipino food, she notes how our native snacks like kalamay and biko are foods of community, meant to be made in large batches and shared, their stickiness a literal manifestation of social bonds that sustain us through grief and joy. The Spanish friars who recorded calamay centuries ago might not have grasped its cultural nuance, but they did observe its chief qualities.
From a simple word and a simple food, kalamay has grown to represent a whole category of Filipino delicacies, and beyond that, an idea. That through patience and unity, disparate ingredients can come together into something delightful. Coconut milk, sugar, and rice do not merge easily. You have to stand at the stove and stir for hours on end. Steadily. Gently. Calmly. In the end it yields, setting into a quivering gel or a pliant cake. Just as time and understanding can calm a turbulent heart, time and heat can transform humble pantry items into kalamay worth sharing.
This is what I think of now when I taste and eat kalamay. I think of my island’s many versions, and how each one brought comfort, as children coming home hungry from school, as adults getting through a night of mourning, or as neighbors carrying gifts of food to each other’ during fiestas and holidays. The myriad forms of kalamay all taught the same lesson, that amid life’s mix of textures the smooth and the rough, the fluid and the solid, we can always find sweetness to bind us together. A sweetness where someone will press into our hands and say, simply, Take comfort.
