alagkit is the Tagalog word for glutinous rice. It is boiled, steamed, pounded, ground, puffed and roasted to produce a thousand and one sticky and sweet delicacies the Orient is known for.

In the Philippines, glutinous rice is grown mostly in Central Luzon and Southern Tagalog. In public markets, one can find two varieties of malagkit. The first class or "sweet" variety, which has a rounded and ivory white grain and the regular or cheaper one with a longish and almost translucent grain.

Most of the native delicacies originating from the different regions of the country contain malagkit as the main ingredient. Coconut, creamy and mildly sweet, always serves as an accompaniment to enhance the malagkit's glutinous texture.

How did the malagkit delicacies we are so fond of come to be? Certainly, their discovery could be attributed to our fore fathers' creative curiosity and experimental spirit. We could imagine, for example, that it must have occurred to them that if sweet rice was boiled in pouches made from nipa leaves or banana leaves, the result would be a fragrant and delectable snack food which we now call suman.

We may also conjure images of farmers' wives in the Ilocos region of yore entertaining the idea of using the mounds of rice chaff that abounded in the fields for cooking. They made a dough from ground sweet rice, mixed it with coconut milk and sugar, wrapped the concoction with layers of banana leaves to protect it from ashes, and placed it under the slow burning rice chaff. The outcome? The exotic tupig we all rave about!