Help Me Chronicle #FilipinoFood

I miss being able to write, and becoming inspired to write about how I feel. 

I feel indignant - though that may be a strong word - about how the reality of in-depth research on the history of Filipino food remains very close to this passage from Doreen Fernandez, in an essay called "Historias, Cronicas, Vocabularios: Some Spanish Sources for Research in Philippine Food" from the Philippine Studies Journal, Vol. 35, No. 3.

I'd like to share a bit of what my last few months have been like. It will be quite detailed, but possibly worth it!

There have been lots of ups and downs over the past four months, along with a good bit of soul searching. I decided to leave a good job working with great people because I felt like I needed to learn more about a medium I used every single day, to explore learning more about how to code and create all these awesome things on the Internet. I discovered the importance of great user experience design, and how it affects every single thing you do, from the second your alarm clock app rings its slow chime to how you choose the wine to have way too many bottles of.

I took classes in front-end web development, and feel like I'm starting to come along. What has been incredibly eye-opening throughout this process surprised me, in very many good ways - I'm learning how not to feel guilty for chasing after my dreams, both the large ones and small.

I would love to help chronicle the history of Philippine cuisine as best as people connected by the Internet can. I would love to get in touch with Philippine food historians, or be placed in contact with them, to ask about how we can build a database that brings the ingredients, origins and evolution of Filipino food forward. I trust this exists in journals, textbooks, and many dusty corners of libraries in the Philippines and elsewhere, and can't wait to work on a project that would allow us to share those stories with the world, told with the help of data, photographs, linked citations and more.

To cover all the viewpoints (including cultural, political and historical aspects) concerning Filipino food will take a lot. I've had this idea in my head for so long as I don't know where to start! What I do know is that I would love to help bring context to our cuisine as it finds its global fans.

Yes, I have an unabashed love for Filipino food - something I came to regard much more deeply since moving to Canada. I have learned to love our cuisine for what it is - spamsilog, buro, sisig and all! - and would also love to share how discovering the history of what constitutes a very big part of me has helped me discover more about who I could be - at the very least, a data collector, presenter, and lover of Filipino food on the Internet.

If you've read this far, and think my pipe dream of travelling the Philippines to document its culinary history hasn't made you "umay", please consider signing up so we can create a group of like-minded (project-minded) folks!

A Coconut Journey from My Desk in Toronto

Sometime in February, when powder-white snow covered everything in Toronto, I sat looking over the oak and pine trees in my yard with a tall glass of coconut water in hand. “It’s amazing, isn’t it?” my boyfriend remarked. “For just over a dollar, we get to enjoy a can of coconut water anytime we like, regardless of where you are in the world.”

That observation has stuck with me since - and has played no small part in my desire to find out more about the history of the foods I love and heartily consume. I have found myself scouring through world history books at the library and spending hours into the late night browsing Internet archive databases, containing, among others, a 1906 paper from The Philippine Journal of Science titled “On the Water Relations of the Coconut Palm,” written by American scholars onsite at the San Ramon Farm in Mindanao province - a study with incredible detail on native coconut farming methods, calculated harvests over time, and hand-drawn illustrations of the insects and pests threatening coconut plantations in the early 20th century Philippines.

Over dinner parties, friends talk excitedly about the farm-to-table movement and sustainable sourcing of ingredients like it’s the latest line of fashion. And in certain ways, it is - global distribution has now allowed products from every corner of the world to land in supermarkets and online grocers at reasonable prices, while encouraging consumers to also learn more about the process that brings far-flung fruit and vegetables into their kitchen. It’s a lot to take in, but the upside to seeing coconut products in North American produce aisles is that the humble cocos nucifera - our ‘tree of life’ - has found new audiences among serious lovers of food.

In the past year, I’ve prepared bibingka espesyal for noche buena, chicken adobo made with coconut milk and soured with tamarinds (a twist on adobong manok sa gata), silky coconut custards and flaky macaroons - all to great reception amongst friends and new family who have never tried our distinctly Filipino ways of enjoying coconuts. At Lamesa Filipino Kitchen in Toronto, Chef Rudy Boquila’s team recently shared a snapshot of a dessert they’ve been working on: coconut pandesal bread pudding with ube de leche, redolent of syrupy purple goodness. “My oh my, this sounds divine!”, said one; “I’m dying” and “You had me at coconut…” said others. In Toronto’s competitive dining scene, Pinoy twists on cooking with coconuts take the win!

When I sit to enjoy meals with others, I also tend to share fun facts about food. Did you know, for instance, that the trunk of a coconut tree is actually composed of thick stems that overlap each other? For those who have procured fresh heart of palm, or ubod ng niyog, from trees felled by storms (regrettably sometimes by hand), what a treat; with a flavour profile similar to water chestnuts, these have been long enjoyed in lumpiang sariwa (fresh spring rolls) for their crisp, refreshing crunch, with a dollop of piquant peanut sauce.

As the venerable food writer Doreen Fernandez notes, “the coconut does indeed serve the Filipino palate from birth to death.” I wondered if ubod was still harvested this way in the Philippines. In my quest to find out, I discovered another study with proposed alternative methods for producing ubod from seedlings, allowing trees to mature fully, alongside expanding markets for pickled ubod overseas.

I then also learned about the development of coconets by the Arboleda family in the Visayas’ Bicol Region. Created solely from fibrous coconut husks, often thrown out in large-scale processing facilities, these incredibly strong nets are now marketed as ‘biodegradable geo-textiles’ — essentially, all-natural woven coconut mats embedded along riverbeds and rice paddies to prevent soil erosion. Truly, locals making the next day better!

Back in Toronto, I cap off an evening research session with an article from the Philippine Daily Inquirer titled “What we can get out of our coconuts.” Despite all there is to be proud of with Filipinos’ use and enjoyment of every part of the coconut tree - from leaves used to wrap kakanin (rice cakes), tree sap fermented into native tuba (toddy), or coconut juice transformed into nata de coco (jelly) - the Philippines also has much room for growth in establishing itself as a global leader in sustainable coconut production.

We already know the world loves coconut recipes (25 million Google search results), beauty-bar tested hair and skin care products made with coconut oil, and dozens of brands of electrolyte-rich coconut water. The question now is, where does the Philippine coconut’s journey go from here?

Photo by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas

Uraro And Keeping Tradition

So why, exactly, am I so obsessed with finding out the history of food I like to call my own?

In quick, layman's terms, I think it is because of this - because I can't stop thinking of dishes I want to make on my own, and the pull of the taste and memories around food becomes stronger the longer I am away. I sincerely believe that Filipino food is damn good. It's more than the gelatinous blob of tepid adobo sitting under a heat lamp for six hours - it's the real stuff, the stuff that should be cared for and preserved, that I feel ardent about protecting and exploring, in the only way I know how - by taking to the internet.

I've been thinking about baked goods today, and in particular, uraro - a light, crumbly biscuit shaped like fat ladyfingers, made with arrowroot flour. In an essay titled "In Search of the Perfect Uraro" by Viol de Guzman (Savor the Word, Anvil Publishing), the writer talks about visiting an uraro bakery in the town of Liliw, Laguna. Through the years I've eaten uraro, I had no care for what they were made of - finally discovering now that the popular pasalubong (take-home) treat is made from a root flour! Was this another example of how the interesting history and origins of food that most Filipinos have at least tried gets lost on younger generations who know delicacies mostly by name, seldom by substance? It has the ability to become a moderately political issue too, I think, because until you're well off enough to have the time to think about where uraro comes from, like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, a person's priorities lie with getting food on the table and securing a roof above their head.

With the artisan food movement's traction globally and a market for stripped down, traditional Filipino cuisine both in the Philippines and elsewhere, I think about whether that's what the internet can help do. Can talking about all this reboot our relationship with the food we love from the ground up, and make it worthy to be proud of our cuisine and its native roots?

"The uraro of yesteryear was a mixture of pure arrowroot flour, rendered pork fat, only the yolks of duck eggs, sugar and milk," says de Guzman. Today, uraro is made from a mixture of arrowroot flour (more often replaced with cassava flour or tapioca as arrowroot is expensive and scarce in the markets), sugar, milk, margarine and eggs.

Who keeps these traditional recipes alive? Do we lose most of them, if not all, due to cost-saving measures which I see the reason for, but is still sad nonetheless? De Guzman adds:

"Changing the recipe is a definite loss for Filipino cooking. Arrowroot flour made uraro light, delicate and easy to digest. The dark orange-red yolk of duck eggs gave its rich color. But it was pig's lard that elevated it into coveted gifts to visitors during town fiestas. An elderly woman whispered, passing on this culinary secret: pork fat, it made all the difference. It made uraro melt on your tongue."

Thoughts On Chopping

I love the act of chopping. Sometimes even when it just needs to be done in quick, rough chops for a stew, or when I have an afternoon and want to pay attention to the fineness of my julienne, the attention to detail that I find incredibly satisfying after seeing a nice, fluffy pile of thread-like vegetables on my chopping block.

My grandmother makes a standard mince look effortless. With her lumpia (fried spring rolls filled with vegetables and meat) the level to which each carrot, red onion, green onion, and sprig of cilantro is minced puts the most aspiring cooks in my family to shame. My grandmother makes trays - literally, catering trays full of these vegetable oil-fried delicacies - that each one of her 21 grandchildren (from 10 of her children) gets to take home a snugly wrapped package in cling wrap or tin foil after coming over to her house for some sort of celebration, often birthdays grouped together or Christmas and Easter celebrations.

When it gets cold and windy outside my apartment in Toronto, and I've arrived home from a long day and an awful commute, sometimes I just want to take a bunch of carrots out the fridge and chop, chop away. The rhythm of repetitive motions - big lengthwise slice, smaller perpendicular slice, stack and align layers together, chop a little more - is something I find calming, even on occasions when I feel more in tune with rage than frustration and desperately want to hack away at the carrot tops over and over again.

I'm not likely going to get to my grandmother's level of dedication of chopping everything into miniscule cubes (a reason for a food processor to be on my wish list), but I do find it comforting; not very long ago, I learned how to cook from people who took the time to prepare their meals because they had to, because beautifully chopped vegetables that you could visibly make out from the well-mashed, puree-like mixture of pork seasoned with fish sauce, vinegar and spices, was a delight on its own to eat. Being the oldest grandchild had its perks, best of which was hanging around the kitchen while my grandmother made these savoury treats, and being the first to pluck those spring rolls (about as tall as my grandmother's middle finger, she cut an entire roll in half to feed more) cooling on a wire rack, fresh from a hot potful of oil.

The Filipino Appetite

What strikes me is that, by the time I became aware of the world outside my suburban bubble in the early 2000s, no one card to expound on Filipino food.

What was "hot" were the cool new restaurants that sprung up in places like Glorietta in Makati, Manila - restaurants in a big outdoor complex from every corner of the world, with one sit-down place serving "traditional" Filipino food. Though we all loved our corner street food stalls, and frequently hung out there still to snack on fishballs or kwek-kwek (quail eggs deep-fried in an orange tempura-like batter) in between classes, the kids who I went to college with all trained to study French techniques, made dishes that tried to recreate what was happening elsewhere in the world. And I get it - to raise our level of prosperity, to compete with the world, the Philippines - top cooking schools taught what modern chefs needed to do to become employed in hotel kitchens and cruise liners around the world. But I never learned to cook sinigang for myself - nor do I remember ever being taught anything in school, formally, of the history of our food, fragmented as we are as a nation. It was just assumed that everyone would know about it, or know someone who could tell you ten essays' worth of information about traditional Filipino cooking.

As Manila (and the Philippines) catches up to the rest of the world, and urban sprawl begins to creep out of cities where call centres have successfully taken off, as dense communities pile atop each other and a generation of middle-class Filipino kids grow up dining in expensive restaurants for their birthdays while eating packaged sinigang mix at home - I wonder whether many other young people really know what it's like to eat Filipino. Yes, food is cool and trendy, and people post pictures of their food on every online platform possible - but do we realize how rich, enticing, and emotionally satisfying it is to eat with our mouths, hands and hearts? I feel silly writing about how all this is making me reconsider the food I have such a strong connection with, much simply by memory. My family loves talking about food. My dad tells a story about lechon - about how he remembers my grandmother coming back with a piglet from the palengke (market) in January, and how with his nine other siblings they raised the pig and fattened him up to be a succulent lemongrass-stuffed hog in time for Christmas. We talked about what parts of the pig go into sisig, that dish of chopped, boiled and grilled pig's ears and cheeks, utterly grossing my Canadian-raised teenage sister out - and I find myself wondering whether other people find this interesting as well.

I'm unsure of what I intend on doing with these notes, but I do want to get them down. I want to figure out why in my head, I feel like I can turn this around, to bring awareness of Filipino food to a larger audience. We have so much to share, techniques that food magazines and bloggers dedicate pages and countless photographs to; a respect for ingredients, cooking practices and knowledge passed down generations, on techniques that include grating coconuts using a dedicated coconut-husking bench, backyard sources of plant and animal food, hands-on butchery and nose-to-tail cooking, not letting a scrap go to waste - like fads, these concepts and popular thinking streams on food circle back to their roots, of recognizing the immediate and real bounty of everything that can be grown, harvested, and eaten around you - no matter what part of the world you're in.

Here are passages from one of my favourite writers, Doreen Gamboa Fernandez, from an essay called "Slow Food" (Savor the Word, Anvil Publishing) that I'd like to share.

When Nita, my cook, goes home to Gapan, Nueva Ecija, she always returns bearing a native, free-range chicken which she had chosen live in the market, taken home in a net bag, and boiled lightly in water and salt at her sister's home. With it she brings the souring element: dahon ng sampaloc - the tiny leaves and flowerets picked from tamarind bushes.

The resulting dish, sinampalukang manok sparked with ginger bits, is ambrosia. It is not sinigang na manok, which is soured with boiled and mashed tamarind fruit. This is chicken - and its liver, gizzard, heart and blood -

tenderized and flavoured with tamarind sprouts and flowerets, its sourness at a gentle edge, its tastiness uniquely pleasurable.

The is slow food, Philippine style, and I am ready to campaign door-to-door to make sure that food like this is not endangered, is not erased from collective memory, is preserved for Filipinos of the future, along with other dishes like it.

Doreen has inspired me to write more.