Two women & their taste buds

Molly Wizenberg said in A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table, that we are never really alone in the kitchen. “We bring fathers and mothers and kitchen tables, and every meal we have ever eaten. Food is never just food.”

Two women — cultural activist Baboo Mondoñedo, and Erlinda Panlilio, whose family owned D&E restaurant, Sulo Hotel and Silahis Hotel — tell stories from their journeys with food.

1. The food culture up north

By BABOO MONDOÑEDO

Where there is smoke, there is meat, especially for Easter Sunday. My move to Baguio 25 years ago exposed me to new concepts of food and eating that related to culture and life system. Food is part of ritual. Animal offerings would be made and people called to witness and join in the celebration. Burnt meat was always good news, as it was always fresh. After the reading of the bile by a mambunong (native priest) and cutting up the pig, parts are set aside for specific people. Sometimes, watwat (raw meat) is given out to the guests.

In Benguet feasts, the skin and fat under it are roasted together with the liver as demshang appetizers and taken with rice wine, gin and other beverages. The liver is normally given to special guests, people who have held cañaos. Then steamed kamote and gabi are passed around. These keep your hunger at bay while the meat is being cooked.

Living and working in the Cordilleras let me observe the eating habits of people. In the lowlands, sayote is special — boiled, peeled, sliced and buttered. In the mountains, it is pig’s food. We tried a variety of food unfamiliar to us — dog, bats that tasted like chicken, algae “living things” scraped from under river rocks, palileng river fish, locusts, ants and juju small eels.

Every now and then, I still think about the good ole days of Session Café, Dainty, Chicken House and Café Amapola. The Café is a story of food and friendship, of an extended family made up of retazos of other families. We took care of each other’s children, watched them grow taller than their parents and be their own persons.

The market is one of my favorite places in Baguio; a trip there is sure to cure depression!   

Food preparation — washing, chopping and slicing — is like a form of meditation. My mother always insisted on piping-hot food served at the table when we were already seated, and making food wait was a crime. Like mother, like daughter.

2. Market, bangus & table tales

By ERLINDA PANLILIO

My parents left teaching at the end of World War II to set up a small coffee shop in Echague, which grew to become a popular restaurant on T. Pinpin on Escolta, where the famous newspaper people of the ‘50s (Teodoro Valencia, Joe Guevara, Joe Burgos, Joe Bautista, Enriqueta David Perez, Chino Roces, Cita Trinidad, etc.) hung around.

The restaurant was called the D&E, from the initials of my mother’s family name, Diaz, and my father’s, Enriquez. At that time my mother was handling the cafeteria service of 12 institutional cafeterias as well. Everyone loved D&E’s Filipino cuisine. They could never have enough, it seemed, of the lumpiang ubod, pansit luglog, sinigang, pochero, and kare-kare that our Bulakeño chief cook, who was my father’s relative, prepared each day. My mother was up at 4 each morning to go to the Quiapo market where she would buy her restaurant’s food supplies. I went to bed often without seeing her, but I knew she kissed me when she got home. It was my yaya Nila who put me to sleep with her fantastic tales of the adventures of Doña Juana, Señorita Maria, and the dashing princess who fell in love with them against the king’s wishes.

During the day, I was left in the care of the maids who followed the radio serials, Ilaw ng Tahanan, At Noon, and Gulong ng Palad at 5 p.m. I listened along with them and enjoyed the adventures, as well, of Prinsipe Amante who always called on the enchantress Buruka for advice, at 6 p.m. in the evening. The maids found it convenient to serve me simple dishes like fried bangus, pork chops, tinolang manok, and sautéed vegetables – cabbage, sayote, upo, sitaw, whatever was available in the house. I became particularly fond of bangus. I would watch the cook as she salted several slices of this fish. As soon as the dollop of white Purico shortening melted in the black frying pan, she would put in the bangus slices, causing the pan to sizzle. The fat belly would jiggle slightly as it cooked in the hot grease. Because the cook was distracted by the radio drama, the bangus would often be a bit burnt.  But I didn’t mind, because it was crispy.

I usually ate alone at our eight-seat dining table in our house on Kamuning Road because my younger brother was never home. He would be out with his friends catching gagamba (spiders) or playing holen (marbles).  I didn’t mind eating alone because then I had the fried bangus all to myself, especially the fatty head and the luscious black belly. How I wished the entire fish had been all belly!

Papa was fussy with food. He liked to cook certain dishes himself. One of his favorites was sinigang na bangus sa bayabas. We had a fecund guava tree in our backyard, which bore fruits that were pink inside. Whenever these were ripe, he would have someone pick them. Then off he would go to the Kamuning market to buy fresh bangus.

First he would boil the guavas in the second ‘rice washing.’ When soft, he would remove the guavas and mash them, take out the seeds and set the guavas aside. Then he would put in the radish, followed a little later by the bangus slices, one or two green chilies (siling haba), one small white onion, and some kangkong leaves, with just a few tender shoots or stalks. He would add back the tender guavas last.

The house would be filled with the fragrant, soothing aroma of the guavas, which never failed to whet my appetite.

Father also liked to cook paksiw na bangus, and insisted on using Paombong vinegar, which is made from the nipa palm. This wasn’t always easy to get. (I find Datu Puti vinegar just as suitable. The Arengga vinegar made in Cavite from the sugar palm is wonderful, too, imparting a lightly sweetish flavor.) If I had a cold, the vinegar, ginger, and green chili peppers in the paksiw never failed to ease it. But it was the taste of the luscious belly, soft and smooth in its fatness, that gave me a sense of well-being. I felt whole and comforted eating it.

I love bangus in all its forms: tinapa (smoked), daing (cured), relleno (stuffed); tocho (with fermented cakes of soybean curd), sinigang (boiled in a sourced broth), inihaw (broiled), cooked with soy sauce and onions, or just plain fried. It reminds me of my father and of the times we spent together as a family, which were mostly on Sundays when my parents’ D&E would be closed.

Bangus was one of the dishes we always had. On Sundays the fish would be stuffed with chopped tomatoes and onions, and broiled. It would be paired with sinigang na baboy or with another of Papa’s favorite Bulacan dishes, hinalog na manok sa sampalok.

The bangus would be all belly in my Eden.