The complex case of finding Filipino identity in food
One Saturday afternoon at my grandmother’s house, a grating sound woke me from my siesta. I was six then. I rose and followed the sound, which led me to the garage. There I saw my grandmother, sitting on a thin, low, wooden bench with a sharp blade on one end. There she sat, stooped, putting all her power into shredding a root crop larger than a potato. She said she would make a cake out if it, a cassava bibingka.
I stayed with her that afternoon, observed, and attempted to offer whatever help I could. There was the occasional mixing while she looked over her kodigo, a hand-written recipe in her years-old recipe notebook, and prepared the next step. We don’t have many cookbooks at home, but we’ve always had our lola’s trusty notebook that we now have a photocopied version of.
Sometimes, I would watch her write down new recipes in perfect script. Flipping through them is like finding snapshots of different moments in her life. Some recipes were from her travels abroad, some were obviously given by amigas because of the inclusion of “a la” in the titles, with the amiga’s name at the end, and some were personal discoveries with the occasional edits. Her notebook has recipes of embutido, as shared by her former neighbor Mrs. Lomboc; homemade broas, a dessert we have every Christmas; and even dishes as simple as fried kangkong.
Nora Daza mentions in the preface of her cookbook A Culinary Life: Personal Recipe Collection, “I have decided that being Filipino doesn’t mean disregarding all foreign influences. It means including everything— yes, the food that may have originated somewhere else but have settled here to become an integral part of Filipino fare.” My grandmother was no Nora Daza, but the wide variety of recipes in both the latter’s published cookbook and my grandmother’s handwritten recipes was no coincidence. Recipes written in notebooks or index cards kept in small boxes and outlined in cookbooks are like stills of a time past and a colorful culinary history.