Banana Leaf-Roasted Rice Cake with Salted Egg and Cheese

The sixteenth-century Venetian scholar Antonio Pigafetta, who sailed along with Magellan on the first circumnavigation of the globe, recorded that the king of Palawan—the westernmost island of the Philippines—greeted them with food “made only of rice,” including “sugar-loaves” that were likely an early form of bibingka, a tender cake of rice flour (and thus naturally gluten free). Sadly, Pigafetta offered no hints of taste or texture, but two centuries later, the Spanish Jesuit historian