Seal Adobo, Bear Nilaga, and Salmon Head Sinigang: Cooking in Alaska
From the 1910s to the 1970s, Filipinas/os constituted the main labor force in Alaska’s salmon canneries. Bunkhouse cooks prepared cheap and monotonous meals of rice alongside salmon, bottom fish, and dried seafood, according to historian Donald Guimary. Contractors closed the kitchens at 8 p.m. , hoarded supplies, and forced workers to buy expensive snacks like chocolate and bis- cuits from the company stores.58 Sinforoso L. Ordona remembers that in 1935 in Alaska, his work crew nearly starved. “We had those biscuits with no butter, no jelly, no coffee, no sugar, no milk, just jet black coffee and we work twelve, fourteen hours,” he said. “We only have one biscuit, no eggs for breakfast.” For lunch, the cook made a pot of munggo beans with only a handful of pigs’ tails to be shared among several dozen men. “We have to fish for the pig tail, no kidding,” he recalled.59
Filipina/o workers in Alaska scavenged and foraged for additional food. The salmon heads and tails that the cannery discarded were turned into sinigang (sour soup). Local crabs were caught and eaten, Ordona remembered. Workers planted vegetable gardens and scavenged for the local wild peas that Filipinas/ os called bukayong. Some would also raise pigs, he remembered. Filipinos also resorted to illegally hunting deer, which they had to hide from their cannery supervisors. “We even kill a bear, a bear to eat, a black bear,” Ordona recalled. “It’s like beef.” Ordona remembers that men were so hungry that they were eat- ing berries and raw mussels, clams, and sea snails they plucked from the shore. Only a telegram reporting the death of a friend by tainted seafood stopped them.60 Workers in the salmon canneries improvised their own bagoong and patis (fish sauce) by salting and fermenting salmon scraps in barrels. “I would salt the salmon, layer by layer, into a 25 gallon barrel made of wood,” Sleepy Caballero of Stockton remembered.
Some of the old timers would get a full size salmon and let it dry out in the shower room, or some would hang them in the enclosed porch. . . . After I filled my barrel, I would immediately go down to the post office and mail it home to my mother in Stockton.61
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When Filipino cannery workers unionized in 1937, their food demands reflected their newfound power, their long years in America, and their desire for a more varied diet.62 In the late 1930s, union representative Prudencio Mori of Local 37 told the supervisor at the Sunnypoint Cannery that their meals did not make for happy workers. “We are served eggs and rice every morning,” Mori remembered. “Rice and boiled salmon at noon, rice and boiled salmon or fried salmon at night. That was the menu throughout the whole season and many people are not fed properly. They are quite unhappy.” Mori demanded bacon and eggs, and jam with bread for breakfast. “Because there are some of us who have been here in the United States for so long, do not eat rice for our breakfast, we would like some bread, bacon, and eggs,” he said. Mori also won his demand for turkey or chicken every Sunday.63
Filipino men who married Native Alaskan women adapted Philippine tech- niques to local ingredients. My father would “hunt moose, porcupine, ptarmi- gan, geese and ducks for our food,” said Lisa Dolchok, daughter of a Cebuano father and a mother of Aleut and Yup’ik heritage. “He cooked with bagoong. He taught us to cook adobo: beaver meat, moose, goose, duck, or whatever meat there was at home. We ate seal meat, seal oil, and dried fish, and rice.”64 Dorothy Larson, the daughter of Jacinto Tagabao Pelagio, a native of Vigan,
Figure 7.3. Filipino asparagus cutters celebrate the end of the asparagus season with a two- hundred-pound lechon, a whole roast pig, at a farm labor camp on Ryer Island in the San Joaquin Delta, June 17, 1938. Courtesy of Antonio Somera.
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Ilocos Sur, and an Iñupiat Eskimo, Lucille Gabriel, remembers well her father’s cooking in Alaska. “My father did most of the cooking,” she recalled. “And he used local meats for his adobo: moose meat, porcupine meat, beaver meat. . . . He dried seal meat and called it tapa, or jerky. And of course, we had rice.”65
Adobo “At Least Once a Week”: Eating and Surviving in the City
Beginning in the 1920s, Filipina/o cooks opened restaurants, grocery stores, and even soda fountains in Chinatowns and Filipina/o American neighbor- hoods. “In the United States the Filipinos never get quite satisfactorily fed unless they eat adobo at least once a week,” declared writer Manuel Buaken in his 1948 memoir I Have Lived with the American People. Buaken’s favorite was the Universal Café, opened in 1938 on Second Street in Los Angeles’s Little Manila. There, Buaken feasted on gulay Ilocano (Ilocano vegetables), ampa- layang manok (chicken with bitter melon), escabecheng isda (fish cooked with peppers and tomatoes), and bagoong with onions. “Here is a place where the pressure of racial differences is relaxed. . . . Here is a place where one hears and speaks one’s own dialect without hostile or curious glances. . . . Here is a place to feed your body and relax your mind and feel at home.”66
The Universal Café was only one of several dozen Los Angeles Filipina/o American eateries. According to scholar Carina Monica Montoya, there were many Filipina/o- owned restaurants in and around Los Angeles’s Little Manila, including the Ace Café, Busy Bee, Luzon, La Divisoria, LVM Café, La Union, Lucky Spot, Moonlight, Three Stars, and My-T-Good Café.67 More than a dozen Filipina/o restaurants also could be found in Stockton’s Little Manila neigh- borhood from the 1910s to the 1940s, including a soda fountain, Filipinas Café, International Café, Luzon Café, Lafayette Lunch Counter, La Union Café, and Mayon Restaurant. As early as 1927, Filipinos in Brooklyn, New York, could sat- isfy their cravings for adobong baboy (pork adobo), sinigang isda, and sinigang visaya (fish in sour broth) at E. G. Lopez’s Manila Karihan Restaurant at 47 Sands Street.68 San Francisco’s earliest Philippine restaurants were Las Filipinas Restaurant in Chinatown at 623 Pacific and the Manila Restaurant at 606 Jack- son, both opening in 1930, and the Luzon Café, the New Luneta Restaurant, and the Baguio Café, all located in Manilatown near and/or on Kearny Street.69 In San Diego, Filipinas/os patronized the Manila Café, downtown on Market Street in the 1930s, and then after World War II, the Bataan Café on Island Street.70 By the 1940s, Filipinas/os in Alaska ran more than a dozen Filipino restaurants.71
Most of these restaurants melded regional styles and cooked very basic Philippine classics in order to appeal to the widest possible audience, while
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others specialized in Visayan or Ilocana/o cooking. In the 1930s, the LVM Café in Little Manila on First Street in Los Angeles served Ilocano specialties like gulay Ilocano (Ilocano vegetables), along with sinigang hipon (shrimp in sour broth), each for sixty-five cents.72 Also in the 1930s, Bibiana Castillano’s Phil- ippine Café in Seattle’s Chinatown catered to Seattle’s heavily Ilocana/o com- munity, often featuring an Ilocano favorite, calding (goat meat). Her daughter Dorothy Cordova recalled the time her uncles brought a goat to her house in Seattle on their way to the restaurant. “The goat just break in that door and run all over,” her uncle Sinforoso Ordona remembered. “We chased him.” They eventually caught and ate it.73
Filipina/o restaurants, grocery stores, and other ethnic businesses in Little Manilas also served as informal banks, community post offices, social halls, employment centers, and gathering points for Filipinas/os. One example was my lolo’s Ambo Mabalon’s restaurant, the Lafayette Lunch Counter, which became one of the most enduring businesses in Stockton’s Little Manila. In 1931, my lolo Ambo bought the restaurant, located at 50 East Lafayette Street, from Margarita Balucas, an Ilocana entrepreneur who had opened it in 1929. Mabalon offered credit and a permanent address to which customers could send their mail while they followed the crops. Lolo Ambo served food familiar to most Filipinas/os, like chicken and pork adobo, diniguan, pancit, sinigang, beef nilaga (boiled beef soup), and sarciado (meat braised in tomato sauce). He saved cooking fats to make his own soap, which he sold, and made his own dried beef, or tapa. By using local ingredients and/or ingredients like salmon and asparagus that were harvested and brought in by Filipina/o workers, he helped create a distinctive Filipina/o American cuisine in Stockton. Filipino jazz bands on their way to gigs at the Little Manila dance halls or at com- munity events would stop first to eat at the Lafayette Lunch Counter.74 “The first spot [we hung around at] was Ambo’s Lafayette Lunch,” Policarpo Por- ras remembered. “So that Lafayette Lunch is the oldest Filipino restaurant in Stockton!”75 My grandfather sold the restaurant to a Filipina/o couple in 1979, and they ran it until 1983. It then was a Mexican restaurant until the city tore down the building for a McDonald’s in 1999.
Many immigrants became dishwashers, busboys, and pantrymen in the hotels and restaurants of major cities, with a handful working their way up to becoming head chefs. For example, Cavite native Paul Paular worked his way up from a dishwasher to the head chef at a fine Los Angeles restaurant, even- tually becoming the head chef at the luxurious Hotel Stockton in the 1940s. In his retirement, he even had his own cooking show on Sacramento local tele- vision in the 1970s.76 Ilocano immigrant Pete Valoria became the head chef of
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Pioneer Tamale in the 1940s, a popular restaurant in Stockton, a position he held for three decades.77 Miguel “Mike” Castillano became the head chef at Seattle’s finest restaurants and retired as the executive chef of the legendary Seattle seafood chain Ivar’s in the 1970s.78
Let’s Go Chop Suey!
Filipina/o American restaurant food was satisfying, but on special occasions, many Filipinas/os would “go chop suey.” For many Filipinas/os, going out for Chinese food was an important symbol of their Americanization. In the Phil- ippines, “they used to kid us, saying, ‘When you go to America you will not see any more rice there,’” recalled one immigrant who arrived in San Francisco in 1926. But “the first thing my father did when he met us was to take us to a chop suey house where there was lots of rice.”79 Anita Bautista’s favorite chop suey place was Gan Chy, in Stockton’s Chinatown. “We would go to celebrate spe- cial occasions such as paydays, birthdays, Christenings, end of the asparagus season, [and it was] a place to take our relatives from Hawai‘i,” she recalled.80
Filipinas/os developed a taste for Chinese food in the Chinese gambling houses. “In the afternoon, there is a table full of all kinds of food—you just
Figure 7.4. Bibiana Castillano (center) ran the popular Philippine Café in the Chinatown district in Seattle, Washington. She specialized in Ilocano food. This day’s specialty, adver- tised in the window, was calding, or goat. Photograph courtesy of Dorothy Cordova.
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help yourself,” remembered Alfonso Yasonia of Lumban, Laguna, of the gam- bling houses in 1920s Seattle.81 In the Delta’s Chinese gambling houses, owners served tea and coffee, doughnuts, rice gruel, chow mein, soup, rice, and chop suey.82 As scholar Heather Lee writes in chapter 3 of this book, by the turn of the century, Chinese American restaurants exploded in popularity. Most of them, as historian Renqiu Yu notes, stoked the national craze for “chop suey,” the stir-fried “Chinese” dish of diced meats and vegetables. By tweaking their menus and popularizing “Oriental” decor and curtained booths, these restau- rants gave the impression of being sophisticated and exotic.83
Chop suey restaurants were popular for several reasons. Because of the long presence of Chinese in the Philippines, many immigrants already were famil- iar with Chinese food, and Chinatowns often were the only places Filipinas/ os could live. The food was served family style (in large bowls or platters for sharing) and with rice, so the food could be stretched. But most important, as scholar Dorothy Cordova points out, Filipinas/os were never refused service, insulted, or segregated in the back rooms, as they were at white-owned restau- rants.84 In Stockton, Filipinas/os patronized Gan Chy Restaurant at 215 S. El Dorado Street, New China Café, and, for banquets, the glamorous On Lock Sam restaurant on 125 East Washington Street. Many of the most popular chop
Figure 7.5. Pablo “Ambo” Mabalon, the author’s grandfather (left), with a friend in front of his Lafayette Lunch Counter, circa 1940s. He ran the restaurant as the owner-cook from 1931 to 1979. Author’s own collection.
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suey houses, such as Seattle’s Tai Tung (which opened in 1935) and San Fran- cisco’s Yat Gan Low advertised in Filipino American ethnic newspapers across the West Coast.
In 1934, the editors of the Salinas-based Philippines Mail chided Filipinas/os for abandoning their karihans (informal restaurants) for chop suey. “Rizal Day celebrations, birthday, wedding and farewell festivities are not complete with- out taking a trip to some chop suey establishment,” the editors complained.85 Sure, “we go to [Lafayette Lunch Counter] and Mr. Candelario’s restaurant [the Luzon Café],” said Concepcion Lagura of Stockton. But “when they say, ‘Let’s go and eat!’ We go to the chop suey place.”86 This attitude enraged the Luzon Café’s owner-cook Claro Candelario, whose café in Little Manila was featured in America Is in the Heart. “One thing about the Filipino, if he has no job, he comes to beg you to feed him,” he recalled. “But when he has some money, he does not go to you. You see him eating at the Chinese restaurants!” Candelario would seek out his debtors inside crowded chop suey joints. “I go to the guy and ask, “Hey, when will you pay! And he says, ‘You’re embarrassing me!’” he recalled. “I says, “You owe me already about $15, and here you are eating!”87