The American Relationship with Filipino Food, 1898–1946
renÉ Alexander Orquiza Jr.
Filipino Food, 1898–1946
If you had sat down to dinner at the Manila Hotel in 1936, only a few dishes on the menu would have been Filipino. Most of the items—the olives in the India relish, chicken gumbo soup, braised sweetbreads, squab casserole, beans, carrots, potatoes, and petits fours—were so classically French that you easily could have been in a hotel in New York or London. A few Filipino items— mango frappé, pili nuts, lapu-lapu in browned butter, and bamboo shoot salad—hinted at the hotel’s location in America’s most important imperial col- ony in Asia. But the meal made clear that Western food was a marker of class and refinement.1
This chapter explores how American reformers attempted to transform culi- nary knowledge and practices in the Philippines during the forty-eight years when the country was an American colony. I show how food, a basic object of everyday life, was used as a signal of cultural change by American reformers. I first describe how the public schools transformed thinking about food. Girls studied domestic science and home economics, and boys studied agricul- ture. Both further developed their culinary knowledge in secondary schools, vocational schools, and universities. Next, I look at food advertisements from popular Philippine magazines and newspapers. American food companies claimed superiority over their Filipino competitors and used slick artwork, ad copy, and allusions to Filipino and American culture to cultivate consumers’ desires. Last, I examine popular cookbooks from the Philippines. These publi- cations connected the products in the advertisements to the lessons on cook- ing from schools using European and American recipes. Together, these three areas—education, advertising, and cookbooks—attempted to Americanize the Filipino palate.
Before examining these reform efforts, I review how Americans regarded Filipino food at the start of the twentieth century.
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“Not of a Kind or Quality to Support White People”
Most Americans arriving in the Philippines after the Spanish-American War did not want to eat Filipino food. Businessmen like Charles Morris asserted that Manila’s restaurants were “primitive in character” and offered “little more than rice and fruits for sale.”2 Similarly, American teacher Herbert I. Priest- ley deemed the food in Bicol to be “not of a kind or quality to support white people.”3 The food was not enticing to American soldier John Clifford Brown, despite his monotonous army diet of hardtack and canned beef. “I have yet to see a soldier who would tackle any of the cooked dishes,” he said, “and a soldier will try almost anything.”4 The American surveyor José de Olivares labeled Fil- ipino customers at roadside restaurants as “vindictive and treacherous—just the kind of people that all good Americans desire to keep away from.”5 Amer- ican reformers thus had many motives to transform Filipino food and impose American culinary standards. They first targeted the schools by introducing lessons on cooking, eating, and farming.