Fina'denne'

The sauce on a Guam table

Fina'denne' is a spicy, all-purpose Chamorro condiment, a staple of the Guam table. It is spooned over meat or rice, or served in a small dish for dipping. Its name is said to mean something made with chilli pepper, and the same sauce is written as finadene, fina'dene and fina'denni' in other sources. The spelling varies, and the sauce does not.

Guampedia describes it as used in Guam households, restaurants and at fiesta tables, and places it in the middle of the table among the meat dishes. At a roast pig or a steamboat station it sits close to that station. The sauce is part of how a Chamorro meal is laid out, not an extra.

Soy, vinegar and fish

The most common version is the black sauce, made with soy sauce and vinegar, onion and peppers. It goes with meat and chicken. A white version is made with lemon or vinegar and salt, with onion, red peppers and cherry tomatoes, and it goes with fish and with tinala' katne, dried beef. Wikipedia describes lemon-based fina'denne' as typically used with fish and more delicate dishes.

A fish-brine version, chigu'an fina'denne', is made with salt and fish brine and is similar to fish sauces found in Southeast Asia and the Philippines. Guampedia names it as a variation, but the sources do not describe how it is made, cured or kept, so this page does not give a method for it.

The variety of the family is wide. Wikipedia lists a salt and pepper version as the earliest form, a tuba vinegar version, a binakle version made with tuba and a lemon-only version with no soy sauce. Some of these are cited and some are not, and the page records them as a family of condiments rather than one recipe.

How the sauce changed

Before the Japanese introduced soy sauce, Chamorros made fina'denne' from tuba vinegar, which is fermented coconut sap, with salt, lemon, water and fresh pepper. Filipino immigrants introduced the tapping of coconut trees for sap during the Spanish period, and the tuba came with them. Guampedia adds that before soy and tuba, a simple mix of salt and red peppers was used, and that fresh red peppers were introduced by the Spanish.

Wikipedia puts the oldest form earlier, before Spanish colonisation in the late seventeenth century, when it was only salt and pepper. That dating is uncited, so the page records it as a claim and does not treat it as established. The soy-sauce version is the one most readers now picture, and its arrival is credited to Japanese settlers, though no date is given for the introduction.

The recipe and its choices

The Guampedia recipe, from a Guam cook, uses two-thirds of a cup of soy sauce, half a cup of vinegar, a quarter of a white onion diced, and four donne' peppers, with dinanche optional. The cook mixes everything in a glass bowl and serves. Crushing the peppers makes the sauce hotter, and they can be cut or left whole. Ingredients can be adjusted to taste.

Vinegar is a flexible part of the formula. The sources name white, cider or coconut vinegar, or lime, as alternatives, and the older tuba version used a coconut-sap vinegar. The salted pepper paste dinanche can replace fresh peppers,

Eating it

The soy version is spooned over red meat, pork and chicken. The lemon version is used with fish and with more delicate dishes. Wikipedia describes both uses and notes that the sauce is either drizzled over meat or rice or served in a small saucer. The table placement described by Guampedia makes it a shared condiment, to be taken as needed.

The sauce is also a daily flavour in Chamorro homes, and early twentieth-century anthropologists noted its frequent use. That observation is the earliest dated account in the sources, and it describes habit rather than a recipe.

Storage and open questions

The sources give no storage time for fina'denne'. A raw sauce of onion and fresh pepper should be kept chilled and used within a short time, and it should not be judged safe by smell or taste. The fish-brine version needs a process that the sources do not give.

Open questions include the date of the soy-sauce version, the date of the earliest salt-and-pepper form, and the proportions of the lemon version, which the sources do not measure. The page records what is documented and leaves those points open.