A Taste of Home: Pinoy Expats and Food Memories

By Edgar Maranan

A collection of Filipino expats’ reminiscences–especially during the writers’ growing-up-into-adulthood years–primarily of home and hometown, but having Filipino cooking as the unifying thread: favorite dishes and native delicacies, family recipes and food rituals, favorite watering holes and memorable eating places anywhere in the Philippines.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anvil Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9789712733031

Book preview

My Father’s Kitchen

for Carlos Dona Montemayor (1935–2003)

Carla Montemayor

My understanding of Pinoy food is patchy. I was born in Manila, which embraces all culinary traditions and none. My parents are northerners who brought with them staples from that region, but we have been thoroughly assimilated into the urban diaspora to be culinary purists.

What I know of food I learned from hanging out with my father, whose cooking repertoire was rather eclectic. It had to be, having had to balance his children’s eccentricities, the constraints of Manila life, and his own need to draw from Ilocano and Pangasinan cooking. What the latter is, I might have to explain.

Pangasinan cuisine is not renowned and, like the language, on the verge of succumbing to pernicious Ilocano imperialism. A lot of it is fish—and vegetable-based.

The key flavoring is fish bagoong from Lingayen. This brownish liquid is used for Ilocano dishes like dinengdeng and pinakbet. You will know true northerners by the way they are repulsed by pinakbet speckled with alamang, which is the pinkish shrimp bagoong. No Pangasinense will use alamang to season vegetables—it’s just not done. It’s a Tagalog (per)version.

Proper bagoong is made in Lingayen the patient, old-fashioned way: by fermenting salted fish in large clay jars. These are then bottled and sold wholesale, or vended to individual buyers from the patios of private houses. I have been on bagoong-buying missions and I have found that there is no stench or flies around the jars, just the sea-smell of fish brewing in their own juices. Makers have explained to me that this is because they do not add water to the mixture, hence there is no decaying process. They use a similar technique to make padas, tiny silver fish suspended in a clear liquid. Padas is used only as a dipping sauce and not mixed in with vegetables or meat. It is so salty, you have to douse it with calamansi.

There are no star dishes in the Pangasinan culinary line-up. There are delicacies like the pingka: dried, crispy swordfish sold in Dagupan. The pride of Pangasinan is the creamy Bonoan bangus that reminds you why it’s called the milk fish. Fancy cooking would ruin it, so the best way to enjoy it is to stuff it with tomatoes and onions, wrap it in banana leaves and grill it, then serve with green mangoes and the indispensable bagoong. Or you could make it into daing by marinating it in vinegar, garlic and pepper, then frying it golden brown.

For meat there is bagisin: chopped pig liver and other innards cooked in spicy sweet oil. And then there are my favorite Alaminos chorizos, the tastiest chorizos I have ever encountered in the country. Stuffed with pork fat and lots of garlic, they are almost orange in color on account of the achuete, which adds an almost imperceptible but distinctive flavor to the mix. The longganisang Lucban is similar and more popular, but does not come close to the tangy, peppery Alaminos version.

My father learned to cook from his grandparents when he was a boy in Alaminos. I am sure he never consulted a cookbook in his life and I suspect, never believed that they were useful. I remember him watching cooking shows once in a while but he never prepared anything identical to the dishes featured on them. He was after ideas, he would say, not recipes.

Cooking sessions with my father were both demanding and joyful occasions that make up the bulk of my memories of him. Demanding because my father was extremely particular about the way ingredients were prepared, and even as a child I was expected to be a capable and obedient assistant. The ampalaya for pinakbet was not to be sliced into strips but cut into chunks and slit three quarters through. Shrimp heads were not to be thrown away but pounded into a paste, to be strained and used as additional flavoring. He taught me how to gut and clean a fish—a skill I was convinced I could do without.

Joyful because my father had a love for food and cooking that was infectious. He would proudly display his ingredients for the day and handle them thoughtfully: fresh bamboo shoots he chanced upon, saluyot he had planted and harvested in the vacant lot next to our house, lapu-lapu offered at a good price by a suki. He would be excited about a menu that he had carefully considered days in advance. He sang and danced in front of the stove, and had a stock of corny lawyer jokes to amuse me. For that was what he was most of the day: a prosecutor for government courts. My dad held down high-pressure jobs since we were little and yet managed to come home on time and cook our dinner. On weekend mornings he would even make trips to the market and serve up exotic meals that he did not have time to prepare during weekdays.

His cooking strategy can best be described as deductive. One starts not with a list of ingredients and instructions, but with the notion of how a dish should taste or how you want it to taste. What goes into it will then be a matter of logic. This is why he never wrote anything down or measured ingredients. Having tasted a dish, he could parse and recreate it from memory.

I would like to say I inherited his talent for capturing and recapturing flavors, but that would not be truthful. What I did learn was an instinctive approach to cooking that served me well when I started living on my own at an early age. It is absolutely critical now that I live away from the Philippines, in a country where the poverty of the national diet would have appalled my father.

I had thought that the quality of British food had been much exaggerated before I came here, but I have had my share of charred sausages, flavorless slabs of beef and overcooked vegetables to conclude that the criticisms have a basis. I can almost hear my father thundering with rage, the way he did when he discovered the stock of instant noodles in my apartment: who eats this junk? Here it’s called rubbish.

As I am very often disappointed by local food, I try to avoid it unless I am compelled to eat it out of hunger or politeness. I cannot afford to eat out very often because I favor Asian and Mediterranean places that tend to be expensive. The best thing to do, really, is to cook for myself and for my friends. Thanks to my father’s training, I am actually eating well.

The biggest challenge is finding ingredients, but globalization has made that somewhat easier. My British friends tell me that had I come to Sheffield ten years ago, I would have had to travel to Manchester (an hour away by train) to buy soy sauce. Today, all the major supermarkets stock light and dark varieties. Chinese and Thai stores even sell Silver Swan. Adobo, therefore, is not a problem, although the price of garlic constantly irks me.

Dishes requiring patis present a different kind of difficulty. It is easy to get hold of, but problematic to use: as foreigners the world over, my housemates complained of the stink. I therefore came to the gut-wrenching decision of using salt in my cooking, relegating patis to a dipping sauce. It works: I do not offend the people I live with and still get my patis fix.

To cook sinigang, I have had to violate my father’s ethics about shunning artificial flavorings since finding fresh tamarind in north England is virtually impossible. I have had to use salmon, the most readily available fish here; and spare ribs, since commercial pork is not bony enough. Once in a while I find kangkong, but I usually substitute spinach or Romaine lettuce (instead of mustasa leaves, when I use miso as the souring agent). You would think that this mutant would be so far removed from the original, but it isn’t. My sinigang is actually celebrated among Pinoy friends.

For panggisa of sundry vegetables, I use streaky bacon instead of flavorless supermarket pork. There is no bagnet here, but Mexican friends have led me to chicharon, which I sometimes use for pinakbet. Alas, no one has yet found a way to export Lingayen bagoong, and so I am forced to use alamang. It feels like committing a major sin, believe me, but I trust that the good Katawan (the Almighty of the Pangasinense) will understand.

I have found frozen wrappers to make lumpia, but to use stuffing made from bland North Sea fish at these prices would be illogical, as my father would put it. I have thus tried it with minced pork and splurge occasionally on prawns to heighten the flavor. I then add carrots, spring onions, dried mushrooms and some vermicelli. It has been a hit among my friends who have never encountered Vietnamese spring rolls. Wow, is this Filipino food?, they marvel. Sure, I mutter out of the corner of my mouth.

What is Filipino food anyway? Adobo? But there are as many versions as there are islands in the archipelago. Our Chinese ties are evident in the noodles and spring rolls, our Spanish roots in the tomato-based dishes. Indon and Malay flavors are in the peanut-based sauce of kare-kare, and our patis habit is surely from Indochina. What is original, I would say, is the alchemy we have employed to produce an entirely unique blend.

For Pinoy food is improvised food. It is food produced from diskarte. There are basic flavors—salty, sour and sweet—but beyond that, you’re on your own, add what you like, use what you can find. We improvise what we eat in the same way we continue to improvise who we are after centuries of influences and impositions.

I am in England at a time when the British are agonizing over what it means to be British. There is a sense that immigration, globalization, Americanization and other political processes have altered the cultural landscape and clouded their collective understanding of themselves, if ever it was clear to begin with. They are thus engaged in a frenzied inventory of all symbols of Britishness: pubs, the Union Jack, cricket, the red buses of London, and surely the old fish and chips.

Except that there were survey findings years ago on how fish and chips have been dislodged as the country’s most popular meal by chicken tikka masala, a curry-based fusion dish invented in the UK. Reactions ranged from bitterness among Anglo-Saxon supremacists on one hand, to PC celebrations of a questionable multi-culturalism on the other. I, being a self-interested and famished observer in this exercise, have a narrow, politically insensitive view of things: I am grateful that imperial adventures have enriched British cuisine. For what would I do without the occasional tandoori? If the only place to eat were the vile chips shop around the corner?

At the same time, I can comprehend the resentment that an old Brit might feel at this shift in national tastes. It is not all xenophobia or post-imperial hubris, as some might believe, but a blur of sentiments: pride, nostalgia, confusion, sadness. I have a friend, for example, whose grandfather refuses to cook with garlic because it is too French—a valiant though belated stand against the Normans, I believe. It is the old who best understand that new flavors mark the end of a way of life.

And so it goes on everywhere, this meditation on being and eating.

Here I find myself trudging through the same treacherous forest of self-definition. When the British say Asian, they mean South Asians: peoples whose lands they conquered in the East and whose food has now returned to conquer theirs. So when I claim to be Asian, I receive doubtful looks. Then again, I am not Chinese nor am I completely Malay—the only other conceptions of Asian that they usually possess.

The best clue I can offer is that I am a combination of those and my food is the same. I cannot survive without rice. I am fueled by smelly sauces and pastes squeezed from sea creatures. I am not repulsed by fish heads or by other awkward animal parts. No, I am not partial to spicy food; those would be Thais, Vietnamese and people in central Philippines. I am from Manila, but my roots are in the north. There you will find a frugal people who eat leaves and shoots that other Filipinos would consider to be weeds and whose liberal use of salt would cause renal failure among the less hardy. There is of course no need to constantly expound on my provenance; this is my own reckoning of who I am and where I come from, things I need to clarify for myself to salve the insecurity that comes with being foreign.

But who I am is not just what my passport proclaims me to be. Away from my family and at my most independent, it has never been clearer to me that I am my father’s daughter. He is in the way I cook, the way I laugh, the way I attempt to be kind.

When I had some extra cash a couple of years ago, I built him a new kitchen with wide counters and an industrial sink. He would take his radio and spend hours there, whipping up his menu for the day, doing a few mambo steps and listening to music from the Fifties. Some weekends I was home, I joined him. I realize now that those weekends were too few.

He enjoyed that kitchen for two years before he died, a gourmand to the end, detesting hospital food and requesting all sorts of treats he knew he would get because he was terminally ill. He never lost his appetite—the one and most appropriate blessing I can think of for a man who adored food.

One of the cruelest things his illness brought was a tube down his throat during his last days, enabling him to breathe but keeping him from eating or drinking. I think that is when he decided that it was not worth lingering on; when he could not even eat the fruits his visitors brought him. He died on an October morning three years ago. It was lanzones season.

My sister and I are both far from home these days. She calls often, always concerned about what I do for food here in soggy old England. I visit her in Italy, where the food is sumptuous. And yet after getting our fill of the local stuff, we retreat to her kitchen to cook Pinoy food and our father’s food. Increasingly we find that the two tend to be the same. We are becoming our own parents. We are becoming our own country.

CARLA MONTEMAYOR is studying for her PhD in political communication at the University of Sheffield. She was a media officer for a party-list organization in Congress before she went back to school. She has also worked as information officer, editor and communications consultant for Philippine NGOs and international organizations. She is a contributing writer for Newsbreak magazine, doing political satire, and used to have a column called Absurdia.

A Cubao Childhood in Food

FH Batacan

Even now, when I’m asked to give my address, I have to pause and think; the old one rolls so easily off my tongue, I have to remind myself that I’ve since lived at five other addresses. But the old one—that has stuck in my memory like my birthday or my first kiss: 62-A West Point Street, Cubao, Quezon City. This was where I lived as a child and where I became an adult. Twenty-three years living in the same place, learning its rhythms by heart.

Most memories of my former home are happy ones. And many of the happy ones involve the four of us—my parents, my sister and I—gathered around our tiny dining table, talking, laughing, eating good food. We weren’t rich; our apartment was barely big enough for us, our dogs, roosters and other pets, our massive horde of vinyl and books. My parents worried about where the next paycheck was coming from, our dwindling savings account, a steadily growing hole in the ceiling of an upstairs bedroom where they suspected termites were having a field day.

But however much we had to stretch a peso, there was always money for the really important things: for rent, for school, for music lessons—and for good food. The quality of the ingredients that went into our meals and of the food at the places where we could afford to eat, was always excellent. And the best part: having three of my favorite people in the whole world at the table with me.

For nearly six years now, I’ve lived in Singapore, where people are often too busy to cook, always rushing off to the next appointment, and have to be told three weeks in advance that you plan to invite them over for lunch. I cook often, for practical and social reasons, and also as a kind of rebellion against the pace of life here. So my early food memories sustain me and give me something to aspire to when I ask others to share my table. They have taught me that a good meal is not just about eating: it is about time and ritual, laughter and meaning, memory and place.

Almusal at Baon

I always dreaded the start of any school year as a child, as it meant re-acquainting myself with the same people whom I intensely disliked the year before. It also meant trudging to school—as my sister and I always did, living just a 10-minute walk away—under the threat of rain, in the middle of a downpour, or worse, just after one, when the streets would be muddy as hell, with watered-down dog poo and the bloated bodies of dead frogs. All because the school year starts in the middle of the wet season.

But my parents, wise as they were, knew what to do to get us out of bed and fortify our bodies and spirits for the battles that lay ahead.

They would fry up longganisa.

Now this wasn’t any ordinary longganisa. This was longganisa if angels—or devils—made longganisa: a casing with a satisfying snap, lean ground pork fragrant with pepper, garlic and hints of both vinegar and sugar, tiny bits of unctuous fat. It had the natural brownish color of seasoned meat, not the lurid pink or alarming orange of sausages laced with additives and coloring. No additional oil in the pan: just a judicious piercing of the skin.

After a minute or two in the heat, the sausages would begin to give up their oil, perfuming the entire house. My mother kept them on the fire until they were singed, but not burnt.

Then came the part that made this a truly special breakfast. Once the sausages were removed from the pan, my mother would drain off most of the oil, then use the rest to fry chopped onion, garlic and cold rice.

You know how the big fragrance companies tell you to layer a scent (mainly so you’ll buy more of their products)? Well, this was the culinary equivalent: the rice picked up the flavors of the sausage—the same garlicky punch, the same peppery kick, the same heady mix of sweet and salty and smoky—but in a slightly more muted form. It was the curtain-raiser for the real thing. With a fried egg and a little vinegar on the side, the meal was almost a religious experience.

But above all, it was a message: that, regardless of what storms you would have to endure, what demons you were going to face, what monsters you were going to challenge in these first, terrible, traumatic days of the new school year, you had parents who loved you enough to make you a breakfast worthy of your trials.

We rarely had longganisa for breakfast in the dry months, or when summer was approaching. By then, all our battles, real or imagined, would be coming to a close. Triumphant or not, we knew rest and fun and long lazy days lay ahead. My parents knew that growing up was a tough job, and they saved their best weapons for when we really needed them: at school. Most people’s memories of school are bathed in the rosy glow of nostalgia (and quite possibly, denial). But to me, it was a social minefield, a snake-pit with its cliques and camps, small betrayals and little killings.

And so, apart from our wonderful breakfasts at the start of the school year, we had even more wonderful boxed lunches and snacks.

My mother used to make scrumptious hamburgers that were oval instead of circular—the better to fit, not into a round hamburger bun, but a humongous pan de sal bought from a bakery not far from school. After Christmas and New Year, we would have ham sandwiches as only my father could make them. He would warm slices of Christmas ham, then strip off the fat and leave it to crisp in the pan: a small trick that made all the difference in taste and texture. Soft white bread, a smear of mayonnaise, plenty of lettuce, tomato and onion.

But the best lunches would be full three-course affairs that would come to us, fresh from our kitchen at home. My mother would bring them to school and wait for us at the canteen. Our classmates, sitting at nearby tables, would be having sandwiches with paper-thin slivers of ham and cheese, or canteen food: oily tocino, wilted vegetables, mystery meat. So when the lids came off our lunch there would be a collective gasp. Crisp green salad, with plump tomato slices, batons of cucumber, onion rings. A golden-brown pan-fried chicken thigh and leg, or a bistek Tagalog crowned with slivered onions. A compote of fresh fruit.

On other days, lunch would be The World’s Best Beef Stew: chunks of brisket, garlic, onions, celery, carrots, potatoes, ripe tomatoes, leeks and bell peppers, bathed in a rich tomato sauce. My puny lunch box was powerless to contain its aroma; like the song of sirens, it would float sinuously through the air-conditioned room where our speech class was held, distracting my classmates and making them forget entire chunks of their oration pieces.

I never let on that it was my lunch and as I preferred to eat alone, nobody ever found out. I relish the thought that some of those girls, all grownups now like me, probably remember that speech class and that wonderful beef stew smell and are still wondering: who the hell was having that for lunch?

Charlie’s

Almost everyone I know has memories of the old Ma Mon Luk on Aurora Boulevard. But I have yet to meet someone who remembers Charlie’s Mami House, just across the road. Which is a shame, because people mostly remember Ma Mon Luk for all the wrong reasons: the place’s distinctive smell, its dinginess, the dubious kitchen and table hygiene. It’s almost a badge of honor to say you miss this monument to sticky floors and MSG. But my father was no hostage to the imperatives of coolness; he took us where the food was good, and we kept going until the place moved or went out of business.

To be sure, there was good food to be had at the old Ma Mon Luk. The ampalaya con carne, served on a footed stainless steel dish as part of their comida China set menu, was the first dish ever to convince me that bitter gourd actually was edible, and not some prank played on unsuspecting buyers by bored vegetable sellers. But to me, the food at Charlie’s was vastly superior, and they had cleaner flatware, too.

This was the drill: after Sunday Mass, we would have lunch at Charlie’s, then see a movie at one of the nearby theaters—Remar, Diamond or Coronet, long before they became the seedy hangouts they are now. After the first few times it became a sort of ritual in itself. By the end of Mass, my stomach would be rumbling from hunger; we were the sort of family that practiced not eating before receiving Holy Communion. A short walk to Aurora Boulevard, a right turn, and then, two theaters and a bank later: the air-conditioned comfort of Charlie’s.

The first thing that hit you when you opened the door was the smell of lovingly prepared stock. The restaurant’s mami assembly line was right by the door, enclosed by a perpetually steamed-up wall of glass. No noodle was cooked, no bowls full of ingredients left wilting or drying out in the open air, no stock ladled until the mami man received a dupe of your order.

Only then would he spring into action, assembling your lunch with lightning-fast precision. He would dunk a wire basket of noodles into boiling stock, pour them into a bowl; dunk your wontons into the same stock; slide over to the huge pot of tender beef brisket and ladle out a serving (regular or special) into your bowl of noodles. A handful of vegetables, a ladleful of boiling soup and a final, generous sprinkling of finely cut spring onions.

At our table, the ritual would continue, building on the anticipation. My father was chief saucier: he would line up little sauce bowls and make up our individual sauces to suit whatever we had ordered that day. For beef mami, he would squeeze a whole fat calamansi and add a liberal splash of soy sauce. For won ton mami, it was the same but with a generous squeeze of the house hot sauce. If we were having siopao, he would take the bottle of siopao sauce and squeeze out a large dollop. A few well-arranged drops of hot sauce: spots of muted orange against a dark brown background. He performed this task with great relish, his eyes regularly darting over to the mami corner to check on whether the food was coming.

Finally, the reward. Deep bowls of the most comforting mami: springy noodles, fresh vegetables, brisket that would practically melt in your mouth, tender shredded chicken, pillowy won tons and a soup stock that wasn’t rushed or compromised on in the preparation.

Here again is one reason I always preferred Charlie’s. Whereas the soup at other mami places had the stringy filaments, milk-and-water color and strange taste I always associate with unstrained stock, Charlie’s stock was pristine: clean-tasting yet packed with flavor. And above all, it had no odd floating bits, allowing you to see right down into the bottom of the bowl whether you were having the brownish beef stock or the clear, colorless chicken stock.

But Charlie’s was soon to face the emerging dragon of fast-food restaurants that would eventually dominate Aurora Boulevard. The restaurant eventually closed down or moved away—and my father mourned its loss.

Fasting and Abstinence

Ah, Lent. While most people scrambled out of the city before Holy Wednesday for some serious beach time, my parents firmly believed it was a time for quiet contemplation. And so we had a long list of nos: no fun, no music, no frivolous pursuits, no loud laughter.

But someone obviously forgot to put food on the list. Because what I remember most about Lent was watching the old Family Rosary Crusade dramas with a plate full of really good food. Meatless, yes, but nevertheless brazenly stretching the concept of sacrifice and self-denial.

My mother, ever the efficient homemaker, would worry that the stores and supermarkets would be closed for Holy Week. So early in the morning of Holy Wednesday, she and my dad would make the rounds of her suki at Nepa Q-Mart and Farmers’ Market and buy the freshest seafood and vegetables—just before the vendors themselves closed down their stalls and started the long trek home to their own home towns.

The rest of the day would be a flurry of activity in our small kitchen. Some of the seafood would be frozen for later in the week. The rest was cooked immediately, to be reheated over the next few days. My mother would single-handedly make several days’ worth of meals: sinigang na bangus, little patties made of eggs, breadcrumbs, onions, spices and dulong that she would fry up crisp just before a meal; paksiw na isda with thin strips of eggplant and ampalaya in a clear vinegary broth. Prawns and shrimp were simply salted and steamed to bring out their natural sweetness; tomatoes and onions were chopped for a sarciado of bangus or pampano. Dark green mussels were cooked in onions, ginger and garlic until they opened, bright orange with fat, and gave up their own briny juices; a quick sprinkle of fresh malunggay leaves just before serving. By the end of the day our refrigerator would be groaning with food.

But what would put us firmly over the top in the fasting-and-abstinence stakes was the morning of Maundy Thursday. That was when my mother’s cousin would ring up and announce, in her rapid-fire Bulakeña delivery, that she was sending her teenage sons in the family car with cooked food:

Teresita? Teresita, andyan ka ba? Teresita, makinig ka. Gising na ba kayo? Nag-almusal na ba kayo? Teresita, makinig ka. Pupunta dyan sina Arnel at Noel. Hoy, Teresita? Dala nila yung kotse, pupunta sila dyan. May padala ako sa inyo. Makinig ka! Salubungin mo sila sa gate ha? Andyan ba si Frankie? Gising na ba ang mga bata? Sabihin mo salubungin sila sa gate ha? Sina Arnel at Noel, pupunta dyan! Baka sila makagat ng aso! Salubungin ninyo sa gate ha?

Tita Veroning was and still is a grand lady, always impeccably coiffed, a woman who understood the concept of bling long before the word was ever invented. But she was to the kitchen what General George S. Patton was to the U.S. Third Army: she commandeered a platoon of house helpers who peeled, chopped, diced and deboned, before she stepped in to do the actual cooking and fine-tuning.

My sister and I had a theory about why she had to keep repeating herself, despite the fact that the telephone line was clear—she lived just two streets away, after all. We believed that, from her capacious and well-staffed kitchen, she was sending out similar shipments of food to other Holy Week holdouts, taking upon herself the burden of feeding Catholic relatives and friends who, like us, had staunchly refused to leave the city to go on holiday. Barking out her announcements repeatedly therefore was her way of ensuring that she was indeed talking to the right person, sending the right sons to the right locations with the right food.

A split-second after her telephone call, our cousins would be rapping at the gate, laden with platters of bangus sarciado, en tocho or relleno, fish embotido, vegetable lumpia that was either hubad or rolled up with her own home-made egg wrappers. They would fill up every available surface on our dining table, our kitchen counter, our coffee table and finally, our TV bench. It was like being in the middle of a tornado, but with food flying around instead of debris. After they said their goodbyes and left, the four of us would sit in our tiny living room, saying nothing, our movements slowed by what I now recognize was a mild form of shock.

It was usually my mother who would break the silence:

I hope you’re all hungry because I don’t know how to fit all this into the fridge.

And that’s how, while watching the umpteenth rerun of The Christ of the Ocean and Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth, I came to associate holiness with good food.

Name Your Favorite Junk Food and Why

When I was a kid, Chippy was the ultimate treat. My family didn’t have a great deal of disposable income when my sister and I were growing up. We didn’t get a regular allowance because we rarely took tricycle rides to school and we always had baon. And of course, my wise mother didn’t see what purpose Chippy served in our daily dietary requirements. I used to envy the rich kids who had money to buy Chippy and Choco-Vim for recess. Of course it’s only as a grown-up that one sees the irony: to build an empire, start on the young.

In the snack-food pantheon that exists in my mind, Chippy occupies the same place as, oh, Chaos does in Greek mythology. Before Pringles, before Doritos and Ruffles, before Cornets and cornicks, there was Chippy.

I’ve always thought of Chippy as salty corn flakes, but really, does anyone know what it’s made of? The package says its main ingredient is corn, but how to explain its addictiveness? Is there some secret ingredient X in it that keeps supposedly sensible people reaching for the red-and-white packs long after we’re supposed to be old enough to know better? After all, Chippy is the human equivalent of a salt lick for horses. I suspect one 4.06-ounce pack contains enough sodium for the average human’s recommended daily allowance—multiplied by a year.

Chippy is virtually indestructible. When I was in the first grade, I once had a sandwich filled with a new brand of very spicy canned tuna; I took one bite, hated it, and decided to buy Chippy instead. But back home, my mother too had found the tuna alarmingly spicy and dashed to school with some proper food. Certain I’d be scolded for eating junk food, I stuffed the Chippy into my schoolbag, out of sight.

That same afternoon, the strap on the bag broke, and we had to buy a new one at the old G Miranda book store.

Fast forward twenty years later. Preparing to move to our new house, we unearth decades of junk that we haven’t touched in ages. From a large cardboard box that’s been silently gathering dust for decades, my old schoolbag with the broken strap emerges.

Inside, amid test papers and notebooks, I find my tuna sandwich and my packet of Chippy. The sandwich has turned into a small, superhard square (one corner bitten off) of dead mold, suitable for paving roads. My sister is rolling on the floor laughing until tears stream from her eyes. Then she says: open the Chippy.

My sister and I are in our mid-twenties at this point—responsible, taxpaying citizens—but does this stop us from the sort of buffoonery more suited to teenage fratboys?

Fat chance.

We rip open the pack. Miraculously, the contents still look like—Chippy. Still smell like Chippy. Still have that same Chippy texture when I crumble them between my fingers. But I don’t have the guts to taste them.

No matter. I find it inexplicably comforting to know that, in a world of short shelf-lives and planned obsolescence, Chippy is enduring, steadfast, eternal—sort of like radioactive waste.

If it’s true that cockroaches will survive a nuclear war, then at least they’ll be able to live on Chippy. I can think of worse things to eat.

Food and Revolution

For the better part of the ’80s my father was an anchorman at Radio Veritas. He was there for the three tumultuous years from the assassination of Ninoy Aquino to the February 1986 snap elections that culminated in the EDSA revolt. You may have heard his calm, rational voice, along with the voices of Orly Punzalan and June Keithley, over the radio during those dark days and nights of vigil and tension and hope, long before Marcos loyalist forces destroyed the Veritas transmitter. If you ever heard June Keithley on Radyo Bandido addressing a certain Frankie about having a bowl of mocha ice cream when the whole thing was over, she was actually talking about my dad, who loved his ice cream and a good fight.

And a good fight it was. Radio Veritas would play two anthems when people’s spirits were flagging, first during the horrendous moro-moro that was the vote-counting after the snap elections, then during the run-up to the Edsa Revolt. The first was Mambo Magsaysay, sprightly and light-hearted; the second was Onward Christian Soldiers, martial, resolute. The latter seemed particularly fitting, because the nation was, in a sense, at war with itself.

Some great military leader once said an army marches on its stomach, and that may be one reason why the dictatorship was overthrown: food. At Veritas, people showed their support for the station and its work with generous contributions of food. One well-known group of restaurants would send over literally hundreds of individual servings of their house specialty: a grilled, glossy, brown hunk of juicy chicken served with a perfect little dome of luridly orange rice. For breakfast or merienda, they would send over another artery-clogging specialty: sliced ham, cheese and chicken salad encased in bread dough and, I believe, deep-fried to a golden brown.

Another restaurant would deliver cardboard platters of the most delightful finger sandwiches: crabmeat salad; ham, cheese and cucumber; and sliced beef tongue and mustard. And just in case you had a death wish, they also sent the best chicharon ever: medium-sized chunks of meaty, crunchy, salty pork. For main meals they would send lumpia by the dozens, steaming bilaos of chicken sotanghon, barbecued chicken in a sweetish red glaze.

To wash it all down, one major company would send over cases of canned soda; another would deliver boxes of juice drinks.

Aside from all this bounty, there were individuals and families who also apparently feared that the poor Radio Veritas staff would starve to death even before the loyalist forces got to them. They would send over boxes of puto topped with cheese or salted egg, bilaos of pancit canton and lumpiang shanghai, and a mind-boggling array of sandwiches.

Some of these people were wealthy, of course, and had their own reasons for wanting to be seen supporting the opposition radio station. But many others were just ordinary people—housewives, elderly retirees—who contributed to the overthrow of a dictator in the only way they knew how: with a chopping board, a paring knife, hope and goodwill.

By this time, the ranks of the Veritas regulars had swollen to include a small army of volunteers—academics, professionals, students. They helped man telephone lines, receive and traffic reports on troop movements from all over the country, and performed any errands the already stretched regular staff could not handle. But even the large number of volunteers could not cope with the sheer mountain of food that would come their way, like clockwork, just before every mealtime.

Occasionally some of this bounty would find its way to our small apartment. It was my father’s little sweetener for a wife worried to death that her husband was putting himself in harm’s way, simply by doing his job. It never completely worked, of course. In those dying days and nights of the dictatorship, we barely slept, our ears glued to the radio not just for the news but mostly, for the soothing, familiar sound of Papa’s voice. As long as he was on the air, we knew he was all right; he was alive, and at the very least, he was eating well.

In the years after the revolution—as I grew older and he grew busier, managing the government’s radio stations all over the country—my father and I were to drift apart, as parents and children sometimes do. It became difficult to talk about anything other than work. As I began to get better in the kitchen, food became a sort of code between us. I would cook things he liked, would pay attention to each important detail including the sauces and side dishes that I knew he would be finicky about. In turn, he would eat heartily, asking for seconds, reserving leftovers for the following day.

When it was time to end a long estrangement, food again was the bridge. A huge talakitok head in a sinigang laden with whole kamias, tomatoes, kangkong and sili was just the thing to eat in companionable silence. If you’re lucky, you’ll realize sometime in your life how hard it is to stay angry with someone who loves your cooking.

My father died of cancer in 1997. After I began working as a journalist in Singapore, I learned that the United Nations, somewhere in its vast archive of historical documents and records, has recordings of the Veritas broadcasts during the snap elections and the run-up to the Edsa Revolt. I’ve since been thinking of asking for copies of these recordings, particularly those in which my father is speaking.

If I could get my hands on them, I know what I’d do. I’d whip up something simple but good: some noodles, maybe, or a ham sandwich the way he used to make it. I’d buy a tub of mocha ice cream.

Then I’d sit in my favorite chair with a plate of food, put my feet up and listen to my father’s voice again.

FH BATACAN, Ichi to her friends, is a writer and journalist currently based in Singapore. She has won several literary awards for her fiction, including the Carlos Palanca Grand Prize in 1999, a National Book Award in 2002, and the Madrigal-Gonzalez Award in 2003—for her first novel, Smaller and smaller circles. She’s currently working on her second one. Ichi can handle large knives and raw meat with great ease—usually together. This, she has found, is useful in writing crime fiction. She thinks Philippine cuisine is vastly underrated; and the fact that Filipinos keep foisting balut on unwilling foreigners and cooking meat with handfuls of sugar isn’t helping. Chippy remains her favorite junk food, and she still looks forward to Lent for all the wrong reasons.

Ruminations on Eating (and Being) Pinoy Overseas

Evan P. Garcia & Jocelyn Batoon-Garcia

Food is an elemental obsession for many people. For migrants, émigrés, refugees and all other wandering souls especially, food is a constant reminder of home and hearth left long ago and far away. Filipinos, of course, are no exception. Our food is part of our diasporic nostalgia. Even the palest ersatz adobo can seem, for overseas Filipinos long-deprived of our native victuals, like manna from heaven.

Our food is not only the ballast of daily family life, but is also at the center of Filipino celebration, public and private, in other countries. Far removed from the motherland, our communities around the globe gather to reaffirm their identity by sharing in the joys of preparing and eating fine Filipino food. Whether in simple home-style meals, or in the feasts and fiestas transferred from the Philippines to foreign lands, our cuisine is a proud and prominent component of our heritage.

In North America and many other places nowadays, transplanted Filipinos can find the right ingredients, fresh or processed, for most of our dishes. Asian supermarkets and groceries in America, mostly run by Koreans, Vietnamese and Chinese, carry our kind of fresh vegetables (sitaw, patola, ampalaya, petchay, kangkong, etc.). Filipino food companies, like Mama Sita’s, now produce a more sophisticated range of Filipino spices, seasonings, condiments, and frozen and pre-prepared foods, to accompany the old standard Lorins Patis, Datu Puti vinegar, Silver Swan Soy Sauce, and the Mang Tomas lechon sauce.

On Filipino food exports, one observes that Filipino food products are latecomers, with a very small share of the Asian food product market in many countries. Even where the local minority population is dominated by Filipinos, there are more Thai, Vietnamese, Indian and (of course) Chinese products in the groceries. In the West, Asian products are starting to appear in gourmet and natural food groceries, where Filipino products are still virtually absent. There is a lot of business that can be made in food exports for the Filipino entrepreneur now that Asian cuisine is entering the mainstream throughout the West.

There also seem to be far fewer Filipino restaurants compared to other Asian restaurants around the world. Filipino fine-dining establishments are very rare. This is a pity, because Filipino cooking at home or catered at parties is always well received by non-Filipinos. Perhaps some savvy presentation, a little clever local adaptation, and a good business model could encourage the growth of more Pinoy restaurants abroad that will attract a broader popular clientele.

Cooking Pinoy overseas was not so easy in the past. We were diplomatic brats, growing up as the camp followers of parents in the Foreign Service. We watched our mothers make do with whatever local ingredients they could find