Friday, September 17, 2010

Bagoong vs Alamang

Alamang is shrimp paste.
Bagoong is fermented fish in brine.

It is often mistaken as bagoong because of several reasons:
  1. A Kapampangan dish called Begukan is cooked in baguk, alamang in Tagalog. But it somehow became known amongst Tagalog as binagoongan which is obviously wrong translation.
  2. Barrio Fiesta sells it with the label "bagoong" when it is, in fact, alamang (it has shrimp)
  3. Some people call both as simply bagoong, which doesn't make anything simpler but only more confusing
    • Bagoong alamang for alamang
    • Bagoong isda for bagoong ...what??
"Begukan into Binagoongan" why the confusion?
Tagalog : Kapampangan
Alamang : Baguk
Bagoong : Alubebe
Did you see it? a : b and b : a

I am very much interested who coined the term "binagoongan". That person (it might very well be a fellow Kapampangan!) is the root of all this confusion.

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