A Kapampangan feast

Why were the cuisines of Pampanga and Iloilo conspicuously absent from the Philippines’ Michelin Guide? The former has long held the reputation for good food; the latter, a Unesco-declared Creative City of Gastronomy. Manila, the capital, deserved to have its restaurants rated, and Cebu, too. As an archipelagic nation with different ethnolinguistic groups, the Philippines does not have one but many cuisines. Food is like our history, which is not simply the local history of Manila nor the regional history of Luzon. We do not have one Philippine history, but many Philippine histories, and the task of weaving all the strands into one story is a long and complicated process.

Last week, I crashed Randy David’s 80th birthday lunch at their ancestral home in Betis, Pampanga. It was an excuse to visit and document the Church of Santiago Apostol, famous for its fabulous baroque retablo and its overdecorated painted ceiling. It was also an opportunity to sample a family’s heirloom recipes and compare them with what I grew up with at my grandmother’s table. As a senior citizen, I came prepared with an appetite, plus cholesterol, sugar, and uric acid medication in my pocket. The cooking of Randy’s sisters did not disappoint. All the fiesta staples were at hand: sotanghon (for long life), kaldereta, kare-kare, callos, and lechon (not roasted, but cooked in a wood-fired oven).

I was too polite to check on the plates of the other guests. I ate slowly, purposely, sampling each dish on its own. This required more than two trips to the buffet table, which in polite Manila society would be seen as being gluttonous, but in Pampanga was encouraged as a compliment to the cooks. I focused on the Kapampangan dishes the Davids grew up with: patola misua soup with bola-bolang badbad (what one would mistake for albondigas, or meatballs, was actually made from fish; these were “bangus balls”), and milkfish, which was not served fried but as ceviche cured in native vinegar (in my grandmother’s house, they used “sukang sasa” or palm vinegar).

In a spread dominated by meat, I would normally skip the vegetables, but the stuffed ampalaya was too good to miss. Sauteed “talbos ng sitaw” may seem to be the simplest dish served, but as Randy’s favorite, it was packed with nostalgia and a taste of home. I courted gout with three servings of “tidtad,” the lighter and tastier Kapampangan version of dinuguan. It reminded me of a similar tasting dish called “kilayin,” enriched with liver. Fresh shrimps and tilapia were the healthy options, except that these came with the traditional sides: buro (fermented rice), mustasa or fresh mustard leaves, and bagoong twice-cooked in pork fat. I picked out the cracklings!

Home-cooked desserts were turon and “lelut mais” (a sweet corn and rice porridge). A four-week cycle was followed in my grandmother’s house: “lelut mais” one Sunday would be followed by “lelut balatong” (sweet mung bean porridge) the next week, followed by “guinataan,” and finally “gandus,” or steamed taro served with grated coconut dusted with sugar and sesame seeds. We used to wonder how the turon or banana and jackfruit deep-fried in lumpia wrapper remained crisp for days. We thought the secret was the basket or the newspaper that soaked up the excess oil. The wrapper was crisp because of the caramelized sugar over it, produced with three kilos of sugar. No wonder diabetes runs in our family.

Two desserts the David sisters did not cook that day were tree-ripened sweet mangoes and a gift of an oversized “calamay” made from “duman,” a seasonal green glutinous rice that can only be had in the Christmas season. This was topped with “latik” made from simmering coconut cream till the oil separates, leaving coconut curds. Duman can also be taken as a garnish with thick, hot native chocolate. I prefer to mix duman into my chocolate raw and freshly pounded, while others like it deep fried into crunchy “pinipig.”

Randy’s siblings made me feel at home, even if I was a party crasher. It helped that I spoke Kapampangan badly and that my father and aunts were known to them or their parents. The feast gave me a Proustian moment; it reminded me of the character from Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” (A la recherche du temps perdu), who put a tea-soaked Madeleine on the tip of his tongue and unleashed a flood of childhood memories that filled a novel in seven volumes. The meal prepared by the David sisters brought me back to Sunday lunches in my grandparents’ house in San Fernando. In retrospect, I wondered how my favorite spinster aunt laid out a similar feast for over a hundred people every Sunday from my childhood till my 30s. All that is a memory now; Sunday lunches petered into once-a-month affairs after my grandparents passed, only to fade away after my spinster aunt and all her siblings passed on. In the last Ocampo family lunch I attended years ago, I was already a “lolo” to grandnephews and grandnieces. Looking back, I see how food transcends sustenance; Filipinos bond over family meals and shared memories.

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Comments are welcome at ambeth.ocampo@inquirer.net