My late father was a simple, quiet, kind and wise man. Tall, broad-shouldered, fair-skinned and gray-haired, a bachelor lawyer, he married late at the age of 40, my mother who was all of 24 and as all marriages come to be, he soon found himself raising 3 bouncing children with her. He had only 3 passions in life -- his family, reading and cooking. The latter was a form of expression and love for the former. He loved to cook for the 4 of us. Hailing from Tarlac and Pampanga, which is known to produce the best cooks and gourmets from Luzon, Danding or Dave as he was called, could whip up any dish just by actually tasting it for the first time. He was king of his domain, his kitchen, our kitchen.
Dave belonged to the “oido” (widow) gourmets of old who did not use recipes nor measure ingredients in amounts. Cooking was like playing a piano piece by ear, and required not much flamboyance, preparation and pretense. After all, he believed the secret to good food lay in the chef’s own palate, his taste the key to whipping up a dish. And whip up a dish he did, he could scramble eggs to perfection. A swirl of milk, a dash of pepper, a sliver of tomatoes and a pinch of salt on an olive oil slathered-skillet over medium heat and voila, the richness of the cream jostling with the tartiness of the tomatoes while salt and spice mix in a flurry of flavors and I forgot I was eating a fried egg. He could make the ordinary taste magical.
But Dave was not an ordinary cook, he was way ahead of his time. I remember him tossing a salad of red kidney beans, chopped hardboiled eggs, Italian salami, sliced tomatoes and garnish this with chopped wansoy with a soy-ginger-olive oil-red wine vinaigrette dressing long before fusion and California cuisine was in vogue. And this he did without a recipe. My guess is he would get inspiration from the variety of books he read. He read almost any sort of book he could lay his hands on, science fiction, espionage, history, Shakespeare, you name it. He was not one to travel a lot and he referred to himself as an armchair traveller. Many times he would tell my mother on the occasions she would travel to “go to places that he only read about” and when she came back she bought him a book, an apron, food or liquor, or a kitchen utensil as a present. Shopping for kitchen utensils like a copper pot, a tsokolate batirol, a wooden cutting board for roasts at the local market, supermarket or thrift shops was his idea of a good time. And growing up, I would often tag along as he explained how each implement was used, handled and I watched in awe as he showed off his cooking prowess with his new weapon of choice, in his kingdom, the kitchen.
There were many instances that marked my life by this gourmet that was my father. I remember him raising a gaggle of Peking ducklings in our garden when I was 10 years old and when my mother complained of their constant cooing, he reluctantly slaughtered them and cooked the best fried duck I had tasted (at least until I flew to Hongkong 13 years later). He also raised kamias, siling labuyo, cherry tomatoes and even bonsai blueberries that my mother would harvest to top her Jello cheesecakes with. My mother was of the baking sort and her contribution to my father’s kitchen was the occasional lasagna, spaghetti Bolognese alla Italiano (her specialty) and the veal scallopini. She had her share of culinary wonders however that is another story. My father Dave after all ruled the kitchen.
And so with the food my father prepared, the kitchen came to be the warmth and hearth of our home. For the most part till we all married off, my father made us eat all our meals in the clean kitchen. We only ate in the dining room on special occasions or when we entertained guests, like my aunt from Geneva who married a Swiss scientist who loved my father’s sukang tuba (sugar cane vinegar) that he fermented in Tarlac under the earth for several years and dug up to bring to Manila. My father would make this huge portly Swiss man eat with his hands a whole suha (pomelo) dip it in salt and his famous vinegar and literally drink a few spoonfuls of the precious concoction before my uncle finally pleaded to bring some home to Geneva. And this he did every year when he visited.
They say food evokes memories which for the most part are wonderful. Growing up these memories for the most part happened in Dave’s kitchen. Christmas dinners were always my father’s time to show off his famous cooking. Noche Buena or midnight feast on Christmas Eve was the staple nilagang baka (boiled beef and vegetable broth), paella and his famous asadong baboy (Roast pork stewed in tomatoes) which he would cut in slices before serving us. My mother in turn served her famous Waldorf salad. Dessert would be ensaymada with homemade Tsokolate which my father cooked in his metal batirol (coffee pot). The day after Christmas the nilaga would be re-cooked now with a can of tomato sauce and slow cooked to become the hearty goulash called cocido which we lapped up over hot rice.
Being a Kapampangan, my father was no stranger to the exotic. I recall growing up with a fondness for betute (field frogs) with their headless pot bellies stuffed with ground pork and camaru (field locusts) fried to a toasty crisp. Breakfasts were normally Pampanga longanisa and tocino while dinners were my favorite tidtad (ground beef kidney lungs and heart) or bagis damulag (ground spiced carabao beef) and on special trips from Tarlac we would have my all-time favorite burong asan (fermented rice with fish) that was eaten wrapped in mustard leaves and hito (catfish). I recall how when my husband who was just my boyfriend back then was made to taste frog for the first time by my father and he cringed at the sight of the naked headless creatures, partaking only of a piece of their fleshy leg meat and flicking it to my plate when my father left the kitchen. Or how my younger brother would finish off all the remaining food, he earned the monicker The Clean-up Man from my father. After some time, when my boyfriend and I had gotten engaged he had gotten into the habit of eating with the 5 of us and my father’s cooking, his hearty appetite finally passed my father’s test and my father in one dinner gave his patented smile and his seal of approval to his soon to be son-in-law and remarked, “Now you deserve to be a part of this family.” He always measured a man by his appetite.
Through the years and as we grew older my father still manned the kitchen but his time cooking would diminish slowly and he took to preparing less food. Maybe it was the onset of quick serve meals that was taking over the concept of slow food, which was his forte. Or the fact that we were slowly going and living our own lives, eating less at home and staying out of the house more. However my father quickly adapted to this new wave. In the 1990s when Nissin Monde came up with Lucky Me Pancit Canton the instant noodles in packets he put on his gourmet hat once again and started innovating on this dish, calling it fondly “the greatest invention of the 21st century”. He would whip the proletarian noodles in a jiffy and saute it with sliced cabbage, Chinese sausage bits, carrots, shelled shrimp and top it with chopped hardboiled eggs. Sometimes when he was lazy he would cook it with sliced hotdogs or top it with flaked tuyo (smoked herring) in olive oil and serve it to our kids, his grandchildren who took to it when they would visit him. This undoubtedly made me realize all the more that he was really a chef extraordinaire. In his kitchen, he could whip this noodle dish as easily as he could prepare a rich caldereta (stew) of beef short ribs with pitted green olives, red pimientos in olive oil marinated for 2 days before stewing. And both times they would taste nothing short of perfect.
Many times I would wonder at this man, this big hunk of a man, who would cook with a cold glass of beer in his hand, who made me taste his concoctions at a whim. There were many more dishes that he invented and improvised from the rare occasions he ate out. His ginisang bihod (sautéed fish roe), tidtad and caldereta remain to be my most favorite dishes. Once he clipped a newspaper clipping about how there are 16 different flavors that can be tasted in a fish head and he cooked a mean sinigang na ulo ng isda (stewed fish head soup) to let us taste and identify all those 16 flavors. I recall his fondness when in the early 90s when the chicken inasal (roasted chicken) craze was just making its presence felt he clipped and bought several copies of a food review I wrote for a newspaper for a small hole-in-the wall place called Charlie’s Chicken Inasal and how he was so proud of it. He always wanted me to take after his footsteps and relish and appreciate good food and cook well.
The last time he cooked with fervor in his kitchen was at the baptismal lunch of our third child. He prepared the best caldereta I had tasted, his coup de grace. And I knew then that his cooking days were coming to an end as after that he slowly refused to cook. He stayed away from the kitchen which by then was not big enough for us to eat with him with all his children-in-law and grandchildren. His huge copper pots and cauldrons gave way to smaller wares and more modern kitchen gadgets as he and my mother took to eating smaller, easier to prepare meals by our longtime kusinera (cook).
When he passed on in 2008, I found myself groping for words for his eulogy in my grief and I knew I would not do him justice if I did not mention his passion for life, his family, and his passion for cooking. It was the latter that I emphasized and I reprise from that eulogy what I learned about life from my father’s cooking and his love for good food:
1. The best way to eat a mango is with your hands. You slowly peel the skin of a ripe mango and eat the flesh until you chew it to the bone. This way you get to eat and savor it just like the way you live your life. And don’t mind the mess.
2. A watched pot never boils. Like anything in life, you have to wait for the right time, for the flavors to marry. Anything in life worth keeping is worth waiting for.
3. Cooking as in marriage is a gamble. There is no one perfect recipe, no one perfect dish, no one perfect partner, no one perfect marriage. And it can go either way. But you always use your head as much as your heart.
At the end of the eulogy I was holding back the tears as I tried to remember this brooding figure of a man, whose love for good food and good cooking was surpassed only by his love for his family. I know he is still cooking with a glass of beer in hand, waiting for us in that great big kitchen in the sky, to fill our plates once more with the things he knew we loved best.
