Balut: Fertilized duck eggs and their role in filipino culture

Western Folklore, Spring 2002 by Magat, Margaret

If the practice of eating balut was already common in the 16th century, I am sure it would have been noted by the friars and explorers who were only too eager to mention all the seemingly gross eating habits they could find, such as the Filipino liking for what Spanish chronicler Antonio De Morga called "rotting" fish and shrimps (this may be bagoong, fermented shrimp not unlike fish sauce) (see Blair & Robertson 16:80).

It is my contention that balut-eating developed because it is an easy and relatively cheap protein source for people to eat. I also believe that the aphrodisiac belief attached to it was not originally a reason for people to eat balut, but I would suggest that this belief in balut as an aphrodisiac for men only came about when the Spaniards introduced the concept of "machismo," a notion I will expand on below.

Chinese consumption of fertilized eggs does not appear to be as pervasive as Filipino consumption, which some of my informants confirmed as well when answering the balut survey. Several of them were firm in their opinion that the Chinese did not eat balut. The lack of Chinese recipes mentioning fertilized duck eggs may mean that they are not as popular in China as salted eggs, tea eggs, soy sauce eggs or thousand-year-old eggs. It is worth noting, however, the many similarities between the production of thousand-year-old eggs and fertilized eggs.

Simoons describes the process of making thousand-year-old eggs, where the duck eggs are coated in lime clay and then wrapped up in rice husks (1991:364). In the Philippines, the traditional way of incubating balut involved the eggs being surrounded by heated rice husks. Now, however, mechanical incubators likely warm the balut. Some claim that eggs from an incubator do not taste as good as eggs incubated with rice husks which they say gives balut a sweeter taste.

This phenomenon, where one food item seems more popular in one country than in another, may be explained by cultural differences in taste. Another case which illustrates this is that of bagoong (shrimp paste) which is found in China as well as in the Philippines (Chang 1977:336). Although the shrimp paste in China is basically the same as the one in the Philippines, "these preparations are by no means as popular as they are in Southeast Asia; they are peripheral extensions of the Southeast Asian technology" (Chang 1977:336). It may well be that balut originated in China and was taken up by the Filipinos, but whatever the case, balut is now considerably more popular in the Philippines than in China.

"Balut is sold all the time and everywhere-on streets, at stalls, outside movie houses, outside nightclubs and discos, in markets; by vendors walking, sitting, or squatting; at midnight and early dawn, at breakfast, lunch, merienda, and dinner time" (Fernandez 1994:10). The newly cooked balut are sold with twists of rock salt in baskets covered with cloth to keep them warm, as the vendors walk the streets hawking their wares loudly. Worth noting is the fact that tea eggs in China were sold by vendors at night who called out in a "sing-song" manner (Leung 1976:21). This is much like the way balut is sold, usually at night and accompanied with the vendor's own style of calling "bal-uuuut!" which can vary from person-to-person.