RR [Cooking ng Mamay Ko]

Cooking ng Mamay Ko
August 18, 2002

Our neighbor in Daraga, Albay, the tailor, once had a maid we called Belen. She was not a whiz at cooking but we would gobble up a lot of what she cooked. The tailor's kids and us were playmates. As such, we would go "neighboring" in each other's homes from time to time. When Belen was done with her cooking and it's her wards' time to eat, she would let us eat as well. One time, we mentioned this to Mamay (my mother) and even added that Belen cooks really well. Uncharacteristically, Mamay shot back: "She's not the only one who cooks well, huh. I cook well too."

Mamay indeed cooked well. She always cooked with the freshest ingredients there were since we only lived a stone's throw away from the palengke, thus negating the necessity for a refrigerator. She also had quite a large brood to feed that our long narra dining table would always be full. This table once had a glass cover on top and we would sometimes insert photos underneath. But everytime something spilled on the table, something always seeped through to the photos. The photos would of course be ruined and would even sometimes stick to the glass. The glass would also crack and chip off at certain points. It was considered bad luck to have broken glass at home. The glass had to go. As substitute, we would have fancy plastic table covers or place mats. These would smell though even after a damp piece of rag had been used to clear debris after a meal. Later, the long narra dining table was used uncovered.

Mamay would be at her cooking best specially when Papay was home from his base in Tondo, Manila, from where, as far as our business enterprise then went, he would send vegetables and fruits he would get from Divisoria and ship them all by train to Daraga for Mamay to sell. Papay would plane in at least once a month from Manila to Legazpi where the nearest airport was. One memorable experience from Papay's airplane rides would be when he would let us feast on his pasalubong --- the ham sandwich and candies that passed for food served to him on the aircraft. Philippine Airlines was the only airline then that flew to Albay.

With Papay around, there would be the finest nilagang baka on the table, with its rich and yummy broth and the utak ng baka (actually the bone marrow) competing for Papay's attention and ours, with the greenest pechay, the most tender cubes of Irish potato and the sweetest saging na saba. A dash or a platito of Rufina patis (fish sauce) would go best with the nilagang baka. Fresh boiled rice would complete the meal.

Because we were really a proletariat family and not really from alta sociedad, we did not begin our meals with soup or salad nor end it normally with dessert. However, if we had fruits in season at the sari-sari store, Mamay would serve sliced mangoes or watermelons for panghimagas. Otherwise, it would just be papayas or bananas, either the lakatan or latundan variety.

If Mamay had the time, she would whip up her version of halayang ube, made of mashed Irish potatoes which would have gone to waste had we not cut out the rotting parts. She would add violet food color to turn the mashed potato into the color of ube. She would add kakang gata and condensed milk as well. And she would stir and stir and stir until her arms would want to give up. As the mix thickened, it became harder to stir. And stir she did so as not to burn the mixture. Once the desired consistency was reached, Mamay would then let the mixture cool and transfer to a bandehado. She would also start on slow cooking the rest of the coconut milk left over from the kakang gata to make latik which she would then generously lavish on top of her version of halayang ube.

Another favorite home-made dessert would be mango jam. Once again, we would set aside mangoes with patse or darkened skin specially at the top, which would be our palatandaan that the mango has started to rot . We would cut out this portion and retain the still edible parts. We would slice it off the mango seed and boil it with white sugar. As the mixture thickened, we would take it out of the fire to cool. We would then have dessert or even palaman for hot pan de sal for breakfast.

Tamarindo would also be part of Mamay's home-made cooking menu, although most of the time, we would rather sell it bottled like jams or wrapped in clear cellphane like candies. Tamarindo would be cooked the way we cooked mango jam. All we had to do was boil the tamarindo in a mixture of white sugar and water and stir so frequently to keep the mixture from getting burnt. At the mixture's desired consistency, we would take it off the fire to cool. They would then be transferred to recycled Lady's Choice sandwich spread or peanut butter jars to be sold to classmates. They became bestsellers that sometimes, my sisters' classmates from the upscale St. Agnes' Academy in Legazpi City would drop by our sari-sari store to be first to buy their share.

Apart from nilagang baka, which was one of Papay's favorites, Mamay would also cook sinigang --- hipon, bangus or baboy. Mind you, hipon would be sugpo, bangus would be the fattest and baboy would be liempo or ribs --- just about the premium cut or type. These would have the freshest sahog as well, from the labanos to gabe, to sitaw and kangkong. Since instant sinigang mix was not yet available and popular then, she would invariably let these ingredients simmer in kamias, sampalok, tomato or guava for the asim ng sinigang.

Sinigang na kabute sa bayabas would also be another deliciously sour variant. Mamay would simply add slices of pork liempo to the simmering mix of fresh mushrooms and guavas and voila, another sumptuous ulam at the table.

Prinito would also be another way that Mamay cooked food. Mamay would deep fry fresh dalagang bukid or galunggong. Specially for Papay's sake, she would fry maya-maya or lapu-lapu for escabeche. After cleaning the fish of innards and scales, Mamay would simply slather rock salt over the fish and deep fry them in fresh vegetable oil. Mamay rarely re-heats oil already used although there would be recycled coffee jars by the stove for such --- one for oil used to fry meat and another one exclusively for oil used to fry fish. In the case of the escabeche, Mamay would just make a dash for her ample stocks of carrots, onions and bell peppers at the sari-sari store to garnish the escabeche with. She would simply add cornstarch to the mix to thicken the sauce.

Fried meat usually was pork chops or chicken. Mamay would again simply slather rock salt on the pork chops or marinate the chicken in patis and lemon juice.

Anything fried would have vegetables for a side dish. Mamay would sometimes steam okra or camote tops on top of the boiled rice. As long as there would be sawsawan of bagoong alamang and suka or halubaybay and lemon, then the steamed vegetables were ready to give the prito a run for your stomach's fill. If gulay Baguio were in abundance, we would have chop suey with peeled shrimps or fried pork bits for the veggie dish.

Nilagang baka was not the only beef dish at our table; it would also appear in the form of bistek. But when Mamay once had the opportunity of eating at a fast food shop at the old Makati Commercial Center years ago and before the advent of the Greenbelts and the Gloriettas in the mall scene, she could not forget how tasteful the Korean beef steak that she had eaten. She copied the recipe as far as her tastebuds could remember. She guessed as much that the recipe had sugar because the sauce was sweet and so she included a dash of sugar to the sauce and topped the meat off with freshly sliced white onions of which her sari-sari store also had plenty of.

Apart from anything nilaga or prinito, we would also have adobo, inihaw, or binuro at one time or another. Adobo would almost always be pork; chicken was not so much used for this recipe. Inihaw would either be pork again or hito. Barbecued meat was not part of Mamay's cooking fare (but tocinong baboy was; salitre was still the popular curing mix then) although we could buy them from ambulant or roadside vendors. Binuro (usually tilapia or mustasa) would be a rare treat as Mamay would not do it herself but simply buy wherever she can get them. Not that I relished them; I could not stand the smell.

Shrimps and fish were not the only fresh seafoods our tastebuds became acquainted with. Mamay would also sometimes foray into other forms of crustaceans such as alupihang dagat or lobsters. I don't know if squids are crustaceans but we also had them too. I would sometimes buy these and even the meat myself if Mamay cannot make the trip to the isdaan or the karnehan, so I somehow learned to distinguish which were fresh from the hilado.

Estofado would be another one of Mamay's culinary treats for us. She would boil pig knuckles in a mixture of vinegar and soy sauce till these were tender. She would spice up the flavor with dried laurel leaves, dried banana flowers and black pepper. Her secret ingredient would be a dash of sugar that would caramelize and darken the sauce as well as make it sweeter.

The Bicol region is known for its prevalent use of coconut milk and siling labuyo in its cooking but Mamay was never really influenced by these twin ingredients although we would sometimes have ginataang sitaw or sigarillas with a generous dose of fried bits of pork as sahog.

If there was an exotic specialty in our eating fare, that would be kandengga, which is known as bopis elsewhere. Pig lungs and heart would be boiled till tender and chopped (by hand and not by a food processor which were not yet in vouge then) and sauteed and simmered in vinegar and many other spices. Mamay was not the first to serve us this dish; we had it first from a neighborhood restaurant. My tastebuds are suspect of course but Mamay's version of the kandengga was never malansa.

Fiesta fare, on the other hand, would be the usual menudo, embotido, morcon, lechon, rellenong bangus or rellenong manok. Sometimes there would also be steamed lapu-lapu buried under a thick layer of mayonnaise and chopped bell peppers. As far as I can recall however, Mamay never prepared much for fiesta, which in Daraga, falls on September 8, the feast of the Virgin Mary. She must have contracted some other people to cook an incredibly huge amount of food to be served to neighbors, suki, pechay or mustasa farmers from whom she would buy vegetables to send to Manila specially in times of typhoons and flooding, our school mates and friends, and even people we did not know but who came anyway because it was fiesta. Leche flan would be the major dessert at these fiestas.

Christmas would not be that super special for us. Mamay though would make it a little different by having ham, queso de bola, apples and castanas on the table.

For other special occasions however, such as a birthday celebration, Mamay would see to it that she would at least cook sopas for us. Or else, she would make it a point to have home-cooked or restaurant-bought pansit, with white (rye or brown bread was not familiar then) sliced bread on the side. Sometimes bread slices would have Lady's Choice sandwich spread or margarine or Reno's liver spread sparingly on one side; these slices were paired off and wrapped in colored paper napkins. This passed for sandwiches. I would have an inkling that sandwiches could have hamburger patties garnished with thin cucumber slices only when a high school classmate's parents shared with us these sandwiches for our snacks while taking the National College Entrace Examinations in the late 70s. Pineapple juice, diluted with so much water, but sweetened with almost a kilo of sugar and cooled with chunks of ice water (water frozen in slender plastic bags also used for ice candy, i.e., frozen milk and water flavored with mango, avocado or melon bits) would pass for drinks.

Cakes were never part of our birthdays. The first time I ever had a cake was when I turned 7 years old. We were spending our summer break in Nueva Ecija then, as was our wont during those days, traveling to Manila from Albay via the trains. Our dikong Berto, a distant relative who at one time came under the care of Papay, and who considered Papay a surrogate father after that, worked at the Manila Hotel as waiter. I sort of became a pet nephew of his since I shared his nickname somehow. When he found out that it was my birthday, he came home with a big box of a gift to me. I kept asking what was inside the box but no one would tell me. But when I would shake the box to better get an idea what was inside, they would scold me to stop shaking it. It turned out the box had a round cake inside complete with frosting of lard which of course stuck to the box from my vigorous shaking. I do not remember blowing any candles; maybe there weren't.

Mamay sometimes also brought us cakes of the round chiffon/sponge type with the huge hole in the middle and without the icing. A variation would be a cake with glazed pineapple slices on top. Sometimes it would be pianono. This would be her pasalubong to us specially after she has been gone for almost the whole day which she spent in the farms of Bigaa, Arimbay or Sto. Domingo buying the farmers' vegetables. As soon as the vegetables have been loaded into the trains, she would head back home with the cake. Sometimes, she would also bring us this delicate-tasting pastillas that were packed so slim you would mistake them for sticks of cigarettes.

If Mamay could not cook, at first because she was quite busy at the sari-sari store or at the farms, and later because she must have started to become uninspired, we would do the cooking ourselves specially since we were already old enough to be in the kitchen. When we were younger, participation in the kitchen consisted of washing the dishes, pots and pans. We would do the washing by turns as there were many of us to do it and not too many of us want to do it. This and sweeping the floor constituted what we described in class as household chores.

Cooking by ourselves most likely happened during breakfast when we would invariably cook fried rice to accompany whatever was left over of last night's dinner. In the absence of a refrigerator then, the left over food would of course be kept in the platera that stood so uncomplainingly between the long narra dining table and the door to the kitchen. There were also times when we would try our hand at fying eggs, tocino or dried fish. Or simply heap condensed milk on unsuspecting hot pan de sal. We'll wash down breakfast with Ovaltine or Milo. To perhaps the chagrin now of milk lovers everywhere, we weren't used to drinking milk even then. Osteoporosis was not yet part of the health-conscious lingo that time.

For lunch and dinner fare, we would check out what our neighborhood eateries had to offer. Our favorites would include the tinuktok (ground pork sauteed in its own mantika with achuete and green peas) which we would buy from the eatery owned by a Chinese family, many of the home-cooked style food including the legendary laing, the famed Bicol express, the best halu-halo from Palamigang Bayan just near the intersection of Regidor Street and the town's main thoroughfare, and pansit of flat noodles from the rows of carenderia across our street. At dusk, ambulant or roadside vendors would start selling pinangat of shredded gabi leaves tied with strips of banana bark and filled with flaked fish or minced pork. Tahong dipped in orange-hued batter and deep fried was also a staple at this time, not as ulam though but more as food-between-meals.

Mid-afternoon was time for Mamay's ginatan, a rich mix of sliced saging na saba, chunks of sweet camote or cassava and fresh strips of ripe and sweet langka swimming in thick coconut milk. If Mamay can't serve this, we would just run to the neighborhood palengke and have our pick of sinapot (the Bicolano version of maruya) or kalingking (the Bicolano french fries but made of sweet camote strips). Interestingly, these snacks staples would be sliced and dipped in a simple batter and arranged side by side on top of an unfamiliar leaf and then deep fried. The leaf can be fried again and again and would only lose its shape and form after about a hundred times of being fried. I wish I could have asked the vendors what kind of leaf it was.

Other snacks fare that we would buy at the palengke would be biko, suman, boiled sweet corn, boiled yam strips, balisungsung (glutinous rice cake with bits of coconut flesh and steamed while wrapped in banana leaves), nilupak (boiled cassava or saging na saba pounded manually as grated coconut was mixed from time to time) or bukayo with bits of young soft coconut. Cotton candy, pancakes and "scrambled" (today's version is the shake) were only available during fiestas. Except for cotton candy, we never liked the rest anyway.

Mamay was from a farming family in Nueva Ecija, then as now considered the rice granary of the Philippines. Their family was not of the landed gentry but rather, of the tenant class. This could be the basis for Mamay's distinctly proletariat cooking.

Maybe also due to Mamay's background, our dining table never really had all the food groups represented at every meal. Balanced diet was something we only heard from our Science teachers. Mamay would serve us whatever took her fancy, whatever inspired her, whatever she thought we or Papay would like that day, or whatever was available at the market. But despite such a background, I always felt that Mamay never scrimped when it came to food and letting us eat to our hearts' content even if all we were eating were home-cooked meals and at times, what the neighborhood carenderia had to offer. Fine dining and gourmet food were as far as Pluto was from our real world.

When Mamay died, good food was as scarce as Nido soup from our dining table. Not only did we not have enough money to ensure we were eating three square meals a day, we also lost our Julia Child. But Mamay's cooking lives on. In the memories of my childhood, in my memories of the sometimes noisy but always filling meals we all took atop the long narra dining table and in the meals I cook now which I hope, closely hew to how they would have tasted had Mamay cooked them herself. In the recesses of my tongue, I must be finding ways of thanking Mamay for her cooking. I never did when she was alive; not even when she said she was as good a cook as Belen.