Paper Palate

It is a strange cliche of my life that, whenever I mention to some fellow that I’m Filipino, I will usually be told two things: 1) the women of my country are smokingly hot, 2) the women of my country are fine, fine cooks. It’s usually guys who tell me this, and I’ve lost count of the number of cabbies, shop clerks and retired vets who’ve said to me, “oh, you’re Filipino? My sister-in-law is from the Philippines. Beautiful woman. I love her spring rolls.”

I’ve since ceased looking for innuendo in those statements.

Nonetheless, I can’t disagree with them. It’s an inevitable function of our geography. As a general introduction, the Philippines is an Asian archipelago that was a Spanish colony for 300 years before America won it in the same game of marbles that brought in Guam and Puerto Rico. Prior to this, the islands were a crossroads for Chinese and Muslim merchants traversing the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. As a result, Filipino cuisine is a fascinating form of early fusion where Chinese noodle dishes might share a table with leche flan custard. Imagine a Spanish chef, who’s been honing his technique in the kitchens of Acapulco and Veracruz, and is then re-located to Manila, and has to adapt to Oriental ingredients, and you can probably understand why our adobo deviates from the Mexican sauce of chiles and vinegar and, instead, uses soy sauce, pepper and vinegar. What people nowadays refer to as fusion cuisine, is something we’ve been practicing for centuries.

(and, if you’re curious, the American legacy in Filipino cookery is manifest in a thousand and one creative uses for Spam, tinned vienna sausages, and bottled ketchup. What we learned of American cooking, we learned from GIs and sailors, but you won’t find much mention of that in any of the cookbooks that will follow)

Given that Filipinos form the second largest segment of Asian Americans, one would think that our cuisine would enjoy a higher profile in the States than it does, but while most Americans have grown accustomed to pad thai and sushi, it’s somewhat telling that, to many, the most famous Filipino dish is a Fear Factor classic. If anything, most Filipino cuisine has suffered from a certain rustic simplicity, and has only recently dressed itself well enough to be accessible to outsiders. Indeed, a cursory glance through some classic Filipino cookbooks, like Nora Daza’s 1974 volume, Galing Galing, (the book is roughly equivalent in stature to the Betty Crocker Essentials), reveals a suite of recipes that are either reliant on very specific, highly perishable tropical fruits, or on very specific, very unfamiliar cuts of meat. You could probably find ampalaya (bitter melon) or pig knuckle at a Chinatown grocer, but you might get blank stares with requests for calamansi or leaf lard.

Filipino cuisine became more accessible with the publication of Reynaldo Alejandro’s Philippine Cooking, which took several of our dishes and adapted them to a Western market. Staple Filipino fishes like lapu-lapu and bangus became grouper and milkfish. It became okay to use pepperoni as a substitute for chorizo (which still strikes me as weird, personally), and the saltiest of Filipino seasonings, patis and bagoong became optional garnishes. Some will complain that Reynaldo’s book is showing its age and his list of sources is hopelessly outdated. It’s thus worth noting that an updated version seems to have been published recently, but I haven’t seen it and can’t comment.

In addition there’s also Gerry Gelle’s Filipino Cuisine, which translated regional context in Filipino cookery, so that you could contrast the curries of the Muslim south with the roasted meat dishes of the Northern highland tribes. Gelle’s recipes are also supposed to be slightly more adventurous than their predecessors, possibly accommodating an increased adventurousness in the American palate, but I can’t really comment as I’ve only paged through this book at a store and never actually made the commitment towards actual ownership.

Still, at its base, the Filipino palate does have a tendency towards sour flavors, and Westerners don’t do sour very often. Driven by a need to keep food palatable in a tropical climate, we cook several dishes in quantities of vinegar that would give most folks pause; measured in the proportion of cups and not tablespoons. While any veteran barbecue saucier could tell you that vinegar properly simmered can be a divine base for a sauce, it’s still an unfamiliar concept to most home chefs, and something that seems downright odd when compared to the sweet and spicy flavors of Thai and Vietnamese cooking.

Yet, it’s that uniqueness that makes Filipino food so intriguing, as it is so very much like and unlike the cultures that have surrounded and shaped it. Perhaps the key to our success would be to reinvent ourselves as the Asian answer to American barbecue (have some lechon before you doubt me on that) or perhaps find the missing link that makes us attractive to Latino diners who are probably still weirded out by all of the soy sauce in their estofado. Until then, I’d welcome you to pick either the Gelle or Alejandro book and try out this precursor to East-West fusion cuisine.

As far as the women go … well, combine Oriental grace with Latin curves and Malay cheekbones and what’s not to love?