Reading and Cooking New Dishes in Filipino Kitchens
Cookbooks provided practical instructions and directions for cooking West- ern dishes. They served as primers for the proper preparation and selection of ingredients as well as references for basic nutrition and hygiene. Most cook- books that were published in the Philippines contained recipes from France,
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Spain, and the United States reflected the publishers’ desire to bring foreign cooking into Filipino homes.
Two cookbooks exemplify this desire to popularize European cookery: Rosendo Ignacio’s Aklat ng pagluluto and Crispulo Trinidad’s Pasteleria at reposteria offered classical French and traditional Spanish recipes to Tagalog readers.21 Although Aklat ng pagluluto’s first two chapters focused on hygiene and sanitation, the rest of the book was a collection of classical French and Spanish recipes. For example, the chapter on sauces had recipes for mayon- naise, hollandaise, white espagñole, and white velouté. The soup chapter included Parisien pot-au-feu, consommé with cream, codfish stew, and aspar- agus. The chapter on beef described preparations for oxtails, meatballs, roast beef, filled beef rolls, tongue, and pigs’ trotters, along with Spanish stewed bacalao, bacalao in mayonnaise, and Mallorca calamares. Finally, the baking chapter had French basics like flour doughs, flans and custards, flans with fruit, puddings with fruit, pastry creams, sugared fruits, meringues, cakes, tarts, breads, wafers, biscuits, doughnuts, and rolls. To combat the heat, the book suggested iced-cheese, milk, butter, pineapple, coconut, Chantilly, milk flower, Burgundy, and hollandaise sorbets. Aklat ng pagluluto was the guide- book for Tagalog readers eager to bring French culinary techniques into their homes.
The second cookbook, Pasteleria at reposteria, contained translations into Tagalog of French, German, British, and Spanish baking recipes, especially those for basic doughs and fillings, tarts filled with Gruyere cheese, almonds, toasted rice, chocolate, licorice, and raisins. There were pastels, timbals, and empanadas filled with truffles, almonds, crab, oysters, lamb, poultry, hot onions, fish, and vegetables. Basic pastry sauces and creams such as Spanish, German, crème pâtissière, and two kinds of béchamel accompanied fillings of vanilla, chocolate, toasted rice, caramel, almonds, fruits, pistachios, cider, pep- permint, cherry, apple, and potatoes. In dramatic fashion, the cookbook ended with a chapter on soufflés.
The majority of popular cookbooks in the Philippines, however, were writ- ten in English or Spanish and usually were published by the government. Everyday Cookery for the Home, in both English and Spanish, by Sofia Reyes de Veyra, was printed in 1934 by the Philippine Education Company. De Veyra adapted recipes from the Ladies’ Home Journal to suit the needs, conditions, tastes, and temperament of a Filipino audience. The book did include Filipino recipes such as those for baked lapu-lapu (grouper), bangus (milkfish) loaf, camote (sweet potato) waffles, glacéed camote, mango whip, mango fluff, ubi (purple yam) pudding, pinipig (toasted rice) cookies and macaroons, buko
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(coconut) ice cream, pili (box tree) nut brownies, and calamansi (calamondin) syrup punch. But there were six times as many American recipes in the cook- book as Filipino recipes.22
One cookbook originally published in 1922 and republished in 1978 showed how Filipinos gradually embraced their food over time. Good Cooking and Health in the Tropics, by Mrs. Samuel Francis Gaches, is full of American, Spanish, and Asian recipes. Gaches believed that Filipinos deserved better food, and her book complains about the state of country’s food supply. She explains how inefficient transportation and distribution translate into high prices for seafood. She criticizes unregulated market vendors for what she dubbed “the Oriental custom of having no fixed price but making everything a matter of haggling.”23 Although the cookbook does offer a few Filipino recipes written by two Filipina nurses educated in the United States, most of them are for American food.24 In 1978, the book was reprinted with a new introduction by Carlos Quirino. He writes that even though the original 1922 edition had just a few Filipino recipes, Filipino cuisine had become popular in sophisti- cated circles two generations since the book’s original printing. Filipino dishes were now served “in grand parties and buffets” and in a “proliferation of Fil- ipino restaurants.” Pride in Filipino cuisine had finally arrived. Quirino cele- brates the past by praising the Filipinos, for even though they had “adapted the cakes and desserts and preserves and salads from the American era, [they] preferred the Mechados, Cocidos and Rellenos of the Spaniards, the Humba, Taucho, pansit of the Chinese.”25
Conclusion
The exchange of food went in both directions. Filipino recipes appeared in the United States after Philippine independence in 1946, especially as immigra- tion from the Philippines to the United States increased with the passage of the Immigration Reform Act of 1965. Nora V. Daza’s Galing-Galing: The First Philippine Cookbook for Use in the United States targeted Filipinos abroad who missed the flavors of home. Private school and church cookbooks printed adobo recipes, and the Los Angeles Times Cookbook gave adobo mainstream treatment in 1981.26 The long story of food exchanges between the United States and the Philippines now flipped as Americans tried adobo for themselves.
Today, the Manila Hotel retains many of the features from 1936. Much of the building is the same, with the grand ballroom, the promenade by Manila Bay, and the facade remaining largely intact. What has changed is the hotel’s own kitchens’ pride in Filipino food. Menus in the Manila Hotel now feature