More on Cavite

Cavite is just 60-75 minutes away from Manila, just like commuting from Makati to Quezon City during traffic. Thus, it is one of the closest places to source fresh vegetables and fruits, and even staples like corn and possibly rice and adlai (Job’s tears).

I recently attended a farmers’ gathering in Magallanes, Cavite and tasted recipes using seasonal fruits in sinigang, old recipes for adobo and ginataan (anything with coconut milk) which paired well with fried dried fish from lowland Cavite, and a host of rice cakes and coconut desserts.

The farmers were enthused to bring their own potluck contributions along with stories of how their folks harvested kaong, seriales, local guava and even cacao and coffee.

Another discovery is the industry of cheese-making using carabao’s milk or quesillo, also called kasilyo, kesilyo and similar “sounds like” terms for carabao milk turned into cheese using only vinegar. I had a talk, up close and personal, with Kuya Sam of General Trias, Cavite who has his carabaos in Magallanes and claims they now have over 400 animals as their milk source. This is an art that should not die. We sampled plain kesong puti (white cheese) and mozzarella. I was fortunate to have a guest visiting from Davao who is a master cheesemaker of many years and I let her try the Cavite cheese. It passed her standards with flying colors.

At the same lunch, it was also my first time to see the kaong fruit, what we normally see as an ingredient in halo-halo, our most famous dessert. The same lady farmer also brought her pure vinegar made from the same kaong called irok. A gentleman farmer and his wife brought sinigang soured with fruit in season, which is rambutan. Apparently, in the highlands of Cavite, sinigang is made even with santol or whatever sour fruit is in season. So, listen up, city folks who use instant sinigang mixes. You can use any fruit that is sour, even tomatoes (which is a fruit).

There must have been around 15 farmers and 15 guests who huddled under the nipa hut as we braved the torrential rains and the backlash of Typhoon Goring. But it did not stop us from discovering the pairings popular in Cavite cuisine: ginataan puso ng saging and kamote with fried fish, as we talked about bulalo and eggplant sauce, and so on. We continued to talk about food while enjoying all the meals prepared by the farmers.

Their products only see markets during fiestas or trade fairs sponsored by the local government unit (LGU). Yet they carry on and continue to cook and prepare these local food, to the delight of visitors who otherwise would not taste these home-cooked specialties had it been not for the gathering organized by the farmers themselves. They had support from other Cavite farmers now organized under the Slow Food Cavite Community (www.slowfood.com) because we featured them at the recently held World Food Expo (WOFEX) in SMX Pasay.

Senator Loren Legarda is an ardent fan of these farmers, as she also claims Cavite as her town, her grandmother having been a resident of Tagaytay since the 50s. She visited the WOFEX and gamely tasted each dish and each specialty and almost bought all the farmers’ merchandise so they would go home with empty baskets but full pockets.

At another recent event, a good friend Nisha Alicer invited Cavite chefs to a festival which included an atchara contest in Alfonso, Cavite. The chefs Rhea and Jayjay SyCip of The Fatted Calf and Dorothy Joy Tung of Siglo once more learned about the Alfonso food culture through the mothers and grandmothers featured at the fiesta. These events are important occasions to celebrate local food culture and to work towards its preservation. After all, you do not want to go to Tagaytay or Alfonso to eat a burger or spaghetti. You want to eat local and this is what we aim to promote all over Cavite. Travel through food. We call it Slow Travel or Slow Food Travel, where the destination becomes a gastronomic capital. It also helps in food mapping which we have already done with Department of Tourism (DOT) in Region 3 or Pampanga and Bulacan.

During the pandemic, we were not constrained to conduct a food mapping exercise with DOT tourism officers and local food researchers. Chef Jam Melchor and I worked on the recipes of Bulacan and Pampanga even through virtual means, monitoring the tourism officers and coming up with a publication supported by the LGU and DOT. This can be done, too, in Cavite as well as other places wanting to preserve food and culture.

These places close to the Mega Manila metropolis are centers of food and culture that should not disappear. And all it takes is practice at small local events like our farmers’ gathering and the documentation by progressive local officials like we did with DOT and the Pampanga LGU. If we lose our local food culture, it could be the death of a rich history of gastronomy, especially in places now so reachable by car or bus.

For the consumer, you need to go beyond the usual rice cakes and discover a richer food history by being curious to try local fare. We encourage chefs to use local produce not just for economy and logistics, but for sustainability of the very farmers who can produce harvests for them. If we stop supporting these farmers, they may give up and just go back to regular employment and join the rat race. But they have so much history to offer if we give them the venue to show us their food history. If we demand local food, the farmers will come out of the woodwork, so to speak. Already we are encouraging them to open their homes and farms to visitors like in agri-tourism. But we need interested consumers, too.

Drive up to Cavite and discover our rich food heritage.