Cresencio’s cooking

On the ninth birthday of my father in heaven last Jan. 18, I remembered his cooking. The rich flavor of the dishes he prepared at home was the flavor that made me feel rich when I was a kid.  

The image of my Tatay cooking in the kitchen is one of the memories of him indelibly imprinted in my mind. My father was a good cook. Perhaps that’s an understatement. If I could be as good as him in kitchen wizardry, I would be set for life. Or as the elderly in our barrio would put it, pwede na akong mag-asawa.

My father did not cook all the time, as the chore was mainly relegated to my mother (who, to this day, remains an excellent cook at 74). But in the many occasions that I saw Tatay in our kitchen, he was a delight to watch.

When I was a boy of five or six, I would see Tatay in front of our makeshift stone stove in Gulod, holding a hihip (an improvised blowpipe fashioned from a scrap PVC asbestos pipe). His cheeks were getting puffy like a blowfish as, every now and then, he blew the hihip to sustain the kindled firewood.

On top of the stove was a big kawali (pan) with pork buto-buto. He inherited the pan from his late mother. My father, a farmer who did not own a farm, earned extra money the day before from being a pahinante (a worker bodily carrying sacks of harvested palay from the field to the bodega of the landlord). With the additional money he earned, he treated his family to a mean and delightful feast of adobong buto-buto.

He cooked the dish for hours. He whistled as he added unpeeled heads of garlic, peeled onion bulbs and black peppercorns to the meat submerged in water. He added firewood and used the hihip again to make sure the firewood kept burning. He let the water dry before he put the sukang Paombong. He did not like it too sour. He seasoned the dish further with Marca Piña soy sauce. A dash of brown sugar was sprinkled. Then cloves and cloves of native garlic, sliced onion, siling pasete and laurel leaves were added. Take note that there was no sautéing in his preparation. My father seemed not to favor oil in his cooking. If he could avoid it, he would. (His sinangag or “fried” rice had no oil, either! But it was so good, moist and aromatic with all those unpeeled crushed cloves of native garlic getting toasted in the process.)  

A symphony was heard as the pan simmered. An appetizing aroma permeated in the air. When the pan started to become sticky, the adobong buto-buto was cooked. My father liked his adobo in sanap-sanap style, not too watery and not too dry. And a scramble among us brothers ensued on the dining table. Our teeth sank on the tasty bone because it was almost soft. The tendon around it was gooey. The tender meat was a profusion of flavors — garlicky, a bit spicy, salted perfectly but with a hint of sweetness. The adobong buto-buto of my father was the perfect match to the piping hot steamed sinandomeng rice.  

Talk about rice, my father was also known in the neighborhood, including in the barrios near Gulod, as the go-to person to cook the rice in fiestas or weddings. The taste and texture of his steamed rice was the same whether he cooked a small kaldero or a big vat of rice. He didn’t like the rice halibutnan (undercooked); he liked every grain cooked evenly. He liked it that the rice in itself could be eaten alone.

It was almost magical when he cooked a big vat of rice on atay-atay (slow) fire. Using a big ladle, he stirred the rice non-stop as it boiled. When it was half-cooked, he covered the vat with banana leaves. He sprinkled rock salt on top of the leaves as the rice continued to cook. He said the salt was used to even out the texture of the cooked rice. He did not have a scientific explanation for it but the trick worked all the time. People who attended big gatherings in the neighborhood knew if it was my father who cooked the rice. He never failed in this department. And his steamed rice was not amoy usok (smoky). This skill of his got him several invitations to cook rice, too, in neighboring towns of Cabuyao, even to as far as Cavite and Batangas.

A rich rice dish that my father cooked so well was Valenciana. He just knew where to source the best malagkit (glutinous rice). Valenciana (or arroz Valenciana in some restaurants in Manila) is akin to paella except that instead of a paellera, a vat is used to cook it. Its other ingredients include chicken, chicken liver, gizzard, garbanzos, bell pepper, boiled egg and atsuete (for the yellow-orange color). All these were included to the sautéed garlic and onion. (If ever he sautéed, he used a small amount of cooking oil.) The chicken used in the dish was one of the fowls grazing freely in our backyard. (But my mother caged the chicken first for two to three days — so it would be detoxed from what it pecked from the ground — before it became part of Valenciana.)

My mind still remembers the mouthwatering taste of my father’s Valenciana. It was one dish we had at home once a year, always during fiesta. And I have a fiesta now in my heart remembering Cresencio’s Valenciana.  

Another simple rice dish that my father cooked for our merienda was called antala or glutinous rice boiled in coconut milk. When it is cooked, we dipped it in sugar. But the best part of antala was the tutong that we scraped from the bottom of the pan.

Maya-maya was another simple glutinous rice dish that we relished at home. It was cooked the way the ordinary rice was cooked. Except that the cooked malagkit was eaten with shredded coconut sprinkled with sugar or grated panutsa.

Did I mention that my father cooked his bulalo for eight hours? Yes, eight hours. Slow fire. On a makeshift stove under the himbaba-o tree. Using firewood from his stacks in the kamalig (storeroom). He would cook early in the morning what we would eat for dinner. When the bulalo was cooked, the meat separated from the bone — more than fork tender. Even the bone was almost soft. Or was it just my imagination? But he would only cook bulalo when he had extra money to spare, which was not very common. And he would only cook bulalo if the beef came from a certain market in Tagaytay.

Of all the dishes he cooked at home, my favorite was his pancit mi-ke. In a pan with just a small amount of cooking oil, he sautéed garlic and onion. Then he put the longanisang pula (Chinese sausage) and shredded chicken, hibe (dried shrimp) and some beans. He drowned everything in caldo (chicken broth). When it was boiling, he would season it with soy sauce before putting the mi-ke noodles. After another boil, he sprinkled the dish with kintsay. Then shortly after, he took out the pan from the fire. Pancit mi-ke was served and we all slurped to gastronomic nirvana.

My father’s cooking was without measurements and it also couldn’t measure his encompassing love for us. His cooking was a demonstration of a man’s love for his family. He proved that the best way to his wife’s and their five children’s hearts was through their stomachs. Those stomachs were not alien to what hunger was but he filled them with love in some days he couldn’t fill them with food. He was wanting in so many things yet with the little that he had, he made sure his loved ones would have more than enough.

* * *

(For your new beginnings, e-mail me at bumbaki@yahoo.com. I’m also on Twitter @bum_tenorio and Instagram @bumtenorio. Have a blessed Sunday!)