Accents
Home savory home
Continental bill of fare intensifies longing for home even if my husband and I enjoyed being "d-h" to our granddaughter Danika in Uncle Sam country. Weekends of facing a buffet of oriental cuisine in Chinese restaurants couldn't cure the Pinoy palate's longing for home savory home.
Just minutes away from my daughter Randy's home in South Carolina, there's this Jade Vine restaurant, touted for its Asian menus that just couldn't compare with the Ilonggo's modified concoctions of the foreign recipes. Take our native longganiza: a good example is the meaty—meaning less fat—from Aklan and available in downtown malls. The Portuguese or Spanish sausage is no match to its dash of sweet taste so dear to the Pinoy taste bud. And of course, there's our customized spaghetti that has crossed oceans from its birthplace in Italy, putting the original to discredit.
Ah, yes, how savory is home to the Pinoy who've had a surfeit of bland Stateside fast-food-to-go that glorifies the clock — time being a most precious commodity in harried America. On a less-stressed-out Saturday or Sunday, we would confront a buffet of so-called continental "gourmet dishes," the kind that grace the candle-lit tables of the affluent and the burgis (pity their immaculate linens). 'Twas during those moments when I thought of Ruth who "stood amidst the alien corn," thinking of home. (Whose line of poetry is that I cannot now recall. Just stressing the picture of Ruth in the Bible—a symbol of homesickness, mind you—as well as highlighting the incorruptible Pinoy taste bud.)
Gastronomic delights to die for are right here in beloved Iloilo: kare-kare, the Tagalog dish that has earned delicious nationwide acceptance, eaten with the unmatched ginisang bago-ong; pinakbet from the Ilocos region that, like the kare-kare, was adopted by the rest of the country—you get all the vitamins from the veggies: squash, eggplant, okra, string beans with slivers of diced pork or shrimps thrown in; the chicken and pork adobo that has gained worldwide fame; and the fresh lumpia ubod you can find only in the Philippines—as renown as Bicolandia's famous pili nut marzipan. (Hey, let the rest of the world have their prestige Ferraro, Hershey's chocolates, etc.)
Let me have my buko juice with the young buko meat so tender, they feel like melting in the mouth. (Woe to the cheap restaurateur in the mall food court who include hard shavings of coconut to my dessert of buko pandan. How they desecrate the famous Philippine buko.) I could have a choice of lacatan with the ripe smell or the unpresumptuous tundal for dessert. Finally, no more tasteless bananas from South America for me. I'll have my fill of the incomparable Philippine carabao mango—best eaten peeled, i.e, you peel it yourself and bite, the juice flowing through with the meat.
For merienda, crisp banana cue or banana turon by the roadside, sticks bought as in a drive-through, from our sab-a, no so-called plantain in the U.S. of A. can equal—crisp in the outside, the right ripeness in the inside. Or the bingka sa Mojon? Where are you? Why did I forget to stop for a supot? I think for now I'll have Pavia's baye-baye. A day or two later, I'll have the guinatan with diced gabi or dagmay aplenty, awash in the freshest gata from the Tree of Life (the coconut, what else), not the imported canned coconut milk that has stayed in the grocery shelves for months or perhaps years. I will not make-do with the bottled langka from Thailand. Time to have the sweet-smelling fresh produce from a backyard garden in Leon or Igbaras. I'll thicken the guinatan with transparent tapioca and thinly sliced young coconut meat.
I remember the Pinoy party in South Carolina where some nine people brought dinugu-an to the potluck—a far-cry from the real macoy in the homeland or the ones by Celia and Dedang in my own Barangay San Antonio—expert chefs Celia and Dedang who would never grace Stateside shores; Celia and Dedang whose lechon or litson, however it is spelled, has skin that crackles in the mouth; whose kilawin of cartilaginous pig's ears and pig liver with the zing of kalamansi and dotted with chopped green and red kuritut pepper, produce a mist in the eyes and a tingling in the tongue.
One morning, I'll go for the much awaited breakfast of fried rice profuse with sprinkle-ready fried garlic and the native longganiza, augmented by tapa, and itlog nga pula with slices of onion, sprigs of sibuyas dahon, and tomatoes,
Lunch or dinner? Boneless bangus oozing with belly fat interspersed with spoonfuls of kinilaw nga tangigue or kinilaw nga pasayan and your choice of pork or chicken liver barbecue. Or chicken innards or adidas, why not? And a helping of guinata-ang monggo with dried balingon or da-ing nga lison very mildly salted and graced with vitamin-rich malunggay; plus the gabi or dagmay leaves for the pangat or stems of kangkong, tangkong anyway, for the apan-apan.
Let me have the sinigang of managat head and tail amidst camote tops with the mid-section of the fish broiled for the main event. Plus a serving of the cholesterol-laden lechon (I choose to forget cholesterol for the time being.) I've just enumerated the bill of fare of the strong Iloilo middle class to which I belong — choice gastronomic delight for a little over three hundred pesos or the equivalent of eight dollars at most.
Gee, I'm hungry already. Goodbye McDo, goodbye KFC and your ilk, goodbye you all king of burgers. Where's that jeep going to the La Paz mercado? Ah, La Paz! It is the place to cure the palate's longing for batchoy — orig, steaming, and afloat with bone marrow.
(Comments to lagoc@hargray.com)