Ringed seal adobo

By Jennifer Fergesen

Deep in Svalbard’s polar night, I ate ringed seal adobo. By then I had been living without sun for more than a month, feeling the weight of the dark settle on my neck and shoulders. At 78 degrees latitude, the sun sets for the last time in late October and doesn’t return until March. December is the nadir of the dark, without a trace of twilight on the horizon, when the black sky creeps into minds like a mold.

Ringed seals, unlike me, are evolved for this world. They can dive nearly 50 meters in the Arctic waters to hunt fish and shrimp, maintaining breathing holes in the ice above. Under a blanket of blubber, their flesh is bodybuilder lean, the muscle fibers woven tight as silk jacquard. A staple of Arctic diets for tens of thousands of years, they now appear on half a dozen restaurant menus around Longyearbyen.

I cut into a chunk of that flesh at Mary-Ann’s Polarrigg, surrounded by the hothouse verdure of the hotel’s vinterhage. As the fibers yielded to the knife, I remembered Capiz, the rural Filipino province where I spent a summer collecting recipes for an NGO that ended up being mostly an outlet for poverty tourism. That summer, among other less savory things, I learned that anything alive could be rendered edible through an anointing in adobo — at its most basic, a marinade of vinegar, garlic, and soy sauce or salt. In my notebook were recipes in Ilonggo, the local language, for adobong bao (turtle), suso (freshwater snails), paka (frog), and tugabang (a leafy vegetable that drips strings of mucilage). Seal was as logical a pairing as any of these.

Jonathan Oracion, the Philippines-born chef of Mary-Ann’s, calibrated his adobo to match the animal’s potency. Its dark secretions tinted the sauce ink-black, like a condensation of the sky outside, but the flavor scintillated with light. Vinegar beamed through the faint whiff of kerosene that clings to the fat; ginger and garlic sparkled in the depths. To balance the tartness, Oracion added a pinch of sugar, a controversial ingredient among purists. “Seal has a strong flavor, so you have to make the seasoning strong,” he explained. The recipe was his own invention, created when I asked if he could make something both Filipino and inextricably of Svalbard.

Oracion is one of the dozens of Filipinos who live and work in Longyearbyen, where — as in many incongruously northern places, including Alaska, the Faroe Islands and Greenland — they make up the largest immigrant population. He and his compatriots are used to people asking why they left palm trees and beaches for polar bears and ice, and everyone has a different answer. Some say they wanted to see the Northern Lights, others that they were tired of getting heat rashes. But most share the same core reason for immigrating. With high inequality rates, a weak currency, and a volatile job market that fails to match the population density, Filipinos are under pressure to find work abroad.

They go where they can: The Filipino diaspora, more than 10 million strong, is spread across over 100 countries. They accept extremes that might deter others, like the blazing heat of the Persian Gulf (Dubai is more than 20% Filipino) and the cold and dark of the Arctic. Svalbard’s visa-free status is a strong draw, as is its growing hospitality industry and the predominance of English; a former American colony with nearly 200 native languages, the Philippines uses English as a de facto lingua franca.

According to Svalbardposten, about 115 Filipino citizens now live in Longyearbyen, many following friends and family members who came before them. Oracion, who has a culinary degree and previously worked at Sofitel in Manila, came on the invitation of a friend and fellow chef. “I was afraid the first time he asked,” he said. “And I said no, maybe I need more years. And then the pandemic came, and it struck out my job salary. That's the time I thought, OK, I need to go.”

My first winter in Svalbard was Oracion’s second; he was inured to the polar night that weighed on me that December. His seal adobo, black as the windows of the vinterhage, seemed to incorporate the dark as a seasoning, like the acerbic dose of goat bile in pinapaitan, the pucker of unripe fruit in sinigang. So much of Filipino cuisine involves coaxing deliciousness from the gleanings, finding pleasure in the bitter and the sour.

“If it's winter, you need to prepare mentally, because you can get really stressed,” Oracion said when I asked how he planned to get through the remaining months of night. “But if you have some friends, and you take time to meet them, share some food; that’s basically all you need.”

A version of this story appeared in “Filipino Adobo: Stories Through the Ages,” edited by Claude Tayag.

Jennifer Fergesen is an American writer, editor and former resident of the Spitsbergen Kunstnersenter. Her food journalism has received awards from the James Beard Foundation, the International Association of Culinary Professionals, the Food Writers Association of the Philippines and others. She has an M.A. in creative writing from the University of California, Davis, where she is currently pursuing a Ph.D. Jenniferfergesen.com