There’s No One Like Mom

I’m a Filipina-American and I love cooking. But I can’t cook Filipino food.

I began cooking (or what I thought was cooking) at an early age: when I was seven years old, I boiled water for some instant ramen noodles. My parents both worked, and my two older sisters were probably otherwise occupied—which left me perilously alone and in the kitchen—wondering, how the heck do I turn on the stove? I managed to figure that out without burning myself, cooked an entire pot of ramen noodles, and even managed to add an egg to it. I thought I was pretty good.

Soon I graduated from boiling water to using Betty Crocker cake mixes. By the time I was in the sixth grade, I was helping my parents cook dinner. I’d make a pot of rice, pan fry whatever marinated meat, poultry, or fish my mom had prepared that morning, and chop some veggies for a side dish. My mom would come home before my dad, and sauté the veggies in either soy sauce or oyster sauce. We always had some store-bought dipping sauce on the side, like bagoong (salted shrimp fry), or rice vinegar, mixed with freshly chopped garlic. I didn’t think that any of our meals were particularly Filipino, but these were the foods that my parents prepared for our weeknight dinners. This was all I knew of everyday Filipino cooking.

On special occasions, my mom, grandmother, and aunties would make dishes that did have a decidedly Filipino flare. It would take them all day to chop and mince, to grind (usually by hand with a mortar and pestle), to stir or roll or deep-fry, until the entire house smelled like it was soaked in garlic and fish. It took at least four strong women to churn out the mass of dishes that would fill our dining room table. We had pancit (rice noodles) and palabok (egg noodles), lechon (a whole roasted pig, usually with an apple in its mouth) and adobo (chicken or pork casserole), lumpia (egg roll) and tapa (dried fried beef), dinagoan (pig’s blood soup) and kare kare (oxtails or tripe in a peanut sauce).  Desserts consisted of halo halo (crushed ice with jack fruit, red beans, condensed milk and coconut), babingka (cassava cake), ube (some sort of sweet paste made from a purple root like taro) and puto (rice cake). I was only able to eat these foods on birthdays and holidays, and it never occurred to me that non-Filipinos would ever want to eat what we ate. I mean, pig’s blood?  If I hadn’t eaten it as a babe, then I don’t think I would want to try it as an adult.

Filipino “cuisine” is not commonplace among dishes served by Asian restaurants.  Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Indian—these are the cuisines most frequently mentioned when someone talks about Asian food.