Republic of Taste: The Untold Stories of Cavite Cuisine by Ige Ramos

Growing up in Paranaque, the thing I associated most with Cavite was my family’s annual summer holiday. Right before school started, my cousins and I would pile into a rented van for a long weekend at my aunt’s three-storey apartment overlooking the rotunda in Tagaytay City. It had a rooftop balcony with a view of a sloped hillside, dotted with streetlights down one end and a busy road with streams of cars and jeepneys on the other.

I knew that at some point, we’d stop by Mushroomburger, and buy boxes of espasol (a type of rice cake), buko pie (with a young coconut filling) and milky pastillas from a shop along the highway.

At the house, I developed a love for Scrabble over endless games with two of my aunts, who were both teachers. My favourite part about these Scrabble games were the snacks. American snacks. Someone always brought stacks of imported Oreos, in packages with three rows of at least a dozen cookies each. I looked forward to it all year and dreamed often of gorging on what seemed like unlimited cookies. In my regular life, I only ever ate Heros - the “local” Oreos - in their sari-sari store “tingi” packaging with three individual cookies (not dozens) of each. That’s what I remember most about Tagaytay, and Cavite.

Come to think of it, I did know three other things about Cavite: that people drove to Digman for halo halo, that Kawit was home to Emilio Aguinaldo, and that “Dasma” was someplace the cool kids in my high school went to college.

But what does all this have to do with “Republic of Taste”, a book about Cavite’s food culture?

I’d say everything. Because if I hadn’t read this book, I would have continued to live a life knowing only a very tiny slice about Cavite’s specialties - and much as I loved their garlicky gravy-soaked burger patties, Mushroomburger just doesn’t cut it.

And I’d like to think I’m not alone. From Metro Manila, Cavite tends to be a province that’s just a little too near where all the shiny things are - specifically, the Mall of Asia. For some city dwellers, it’s little more than a sign on a bus or the place a co-worker goes home to. What’s so special about the places you can reach at the end of the Cavite Expressway?

I’ve been thinking of it like a gateway get-away….with lots of delicious things to eat.

Untold stories

“Take for instance the unsung cuisine of Cavite City and the outlying towns in the provinces,” writes Ige Ramos. “With the American base at Sangley Point for more than 70 years, Cavite City was also the portal for the Galleon Trade during the Spanish colonial period…and although locally the indigenous culinary culture remains vibrant, it is still unknown to many.”

“In this book, we celebrate the cuisine of Cavite, borne from history and terroir, democracy and independence, by featuring unpublished heritage recipes gathered from my own and other families.”

“Cavite is a microcosm of what is happening in the Philippine food scene today,” Ramos continues. “People are trying to rediscover culinary traditions that have been there all along…and I urge people in their respective communities to learn and understand how we eat, to know our ingredients and the way we cook, to be aware of our immediate environment.”

What better invitation could I ask for?

“Geography as Culinary Destiny”

Ramos opens the chapter with a familiar scene: asking kids in school where their food comes from. “The supermarket!”, one said, while another answered “from my lola’s kitchen.”

And while that second answer is, indeed, endearing, it’s a fact that many kids (who go to private school at least) in the Philippines expect their food to come from a supermarket or neighbourhood store: canned, shrink-wrapped and mass-produced, just like the rest of us in North America. What percentage of private school students in Cavite have actually visited a local market, or palengke, I wonder? Are visits to markets, or at the very least, learning about what’s locally produced, discussed in school at all?

What I especially like about this book is that ‘place’ plays a major role. If you think of it like a movie, with actors who bring a scene to life…in this case, Cavite isn’t just a location where the actors’ key scenes are shot. It’s a major character, alongside its food, in an epic documentary that I can’t wait to see.

“History has been at the forefront of identifying the sources of our culinary traditions, but people forget that gastronomy has a wider scope,” Ramos writes. Food, he continues, “only plays a fractional part in this ecosystem of understanding our food ways, and it should begin with geography.”

The galleon trade

I certainly had no idea of just how deep Cavite’s roots ran, and how entwined they were with the galleon trade. For roughly 300 years, the ports of Cavite were an actual gateway to Manila, for gold-laden Spanish galleons that miraculously survived the voyage from Manila to Acapulco and back. Having weathered heavy storms, disease, starvation and pirate attacks in the open seas, that last little bit of the voyage always involved docking the galleon safely in Cavite - sometimes, with very few crew members on board. (As an aside, I read about a “ghost” galleon that reached Manila once with everyone on board long eaten away by disease, and could never forget it. The goods where nowhere to be found.)

Those ships, massive in size and witness to so many stories and tragedies, were built by carpenters and craftsmen in Cavite’s shipyards. What did those workers eat? What sorts of food traditions and ingredients were brought in through the galleons and by everyone along the periphery of the world’s first truly global trading industry? It’s a deep rabbit hole, and I’ve yet to finish my 250-page galleon book, “The World of the Manila-Acapulco Galleons” by Edgardo Angara and Carlos Madrid. I think it’s best to leave this question open for awhile :)

But man, I would love to know what they ate. Are the descendants of those dishes alive and well?

San Roque, Cavite

“At the height of the colonial period, as described by Don Gervasio Pangilinan in his book La Historica Cavite…the Fort San Felipe, the arsenal (armory and navy yard) and the varadero were the main sources of employment for menfolk of the city. They worked as clerks, teachers, armorers, coppersmiths, blacksmiths, carpenters, and on the ships as sailors or machinists, provisions master, and cooks.”

“At the end of the day,” Ramos continues, “these labourers passed through the gate of the Porta Vaga and walked along the isthmus towards the garita (guardhouse) to reach San Roque.”

This was easily my second favourite chapter. In it, Ramos talks about lengua de la tienda (language of the shop) and lengua de cocina (language of the kitchen) and how they became a living language, an intrinsic part of the soul of Chabacano - a Spanish-based creole language widely used in Zamboanga and Cavite. Another rabbit hole to explore sometime.

Here, Ramos includes recipes for nogada de pagi (stewed stingray) and pesang isda na may sawsawang miso (fish lightly stewed with miso), dishes whose origins are simultaneously complex yet pleasingly simple to make (though perhaps I’ll wait until my next visit home to purchase a stingray).

Elsewhere in the book, you’ll find recipes for bacalao (much drier and redder than any European version), calandracas (a hearty chicken or ham soup), pancit choco en su tinta (noodles tinted with squid ink) and the local paella valenciana, a specialty in the town of General Trias.

On “Platitos de Condimentos”

“We were a Chabacano family living near Aplayang Munti, a small fishing village in Cavite City. Our neighbours, subsistence fisherfolk, lived by the dalampasigan. When the moon was full and the sea was abundant with fish, they would set off in an armada of bancas,” Ramos writes. “To this day, my mother is still close to this community.”

Ramos describes what a typical day was like for him as a schoolboy, and in detail, one of his favourite dishes - pinangat na bisugo, fish wrapped in banana leaves and stewed in a clay pot with tomatoes and a sour fruit called kamias (sometimes called tree sorrel in English).

All the condiments, on tiny plates around the table, stuck with him as a taste he would never forget. I suppose, similarly - though on a completely different plane - in a way that Oreos carved a sweet little notch on my heart.

“From my parents’ point of view, no matter how basic the food was, having many plates on the table signified abundance,” he writes. “But more important was the fact that our family was partaking and enjoying every minute of the meal.”

With condiments like ground chicharron, patis (fish sauce), burong mangga at labanos (fermented mangoes and radishes), ensaladang kamatis (tomato salad) and itlog na maalat (salted duck egg), that sounds like a legit Filipino meal to enjoy.

Quesillo and tamales

As a child, I associated kesong puti, also called quesillo or fresh cheese, with the neighbouring province of Laguna. This was largely because of field trips to a famous dairy farm where all the kids drank real chocolate milk from an actual bottle; it was light years better than shelf-stable Chocolait. After, we’d buy a couple packets of fresh white cheese as pasalubong to bring home.

In researching Cavite’s quesillo, “there are physical and cultural evidence it might not have come from Mexico at all,” Ramos writes, echoing what most Filipinos assume is the origin of kesong puti - a local adaptation to European cheese-making methods, by way of Acapulco. It may, as Ramos suggests according to literature, instead come “from India via Sumatra, as the manner of producing it is similar to making paneer, a fresh cheese common in South Asia.”

But of course, history is a prominent teacher!

Another admittedly silly thing I came to realize, after reading Republic of Taste, was that the equally famous Robinson’s tamales had nothing at all to do with the chain of Robinsons malls and grocery stores. To learn that history, buy a copy of this book, or better yet, make your way to Cavite City to eat and enjoy one. In essence, Filipino tamales are wrapped in banana leaves, not corn husks, and made with rice flour instead of cornmeal, as traditional Mexican tamales are prepared.

Given all that history with the galleons…I say that’s a perfectly good reason to hop on the highway and drive to Cavite City.