Upon my mother’s instruction, the skeptical cook washed the ipil, sliced it thinly and sautéed it with garlic, onions, and leftover ham. The concoction smelled quite appetizing. Our adventurous spirits were piqued and when the dish was laid out on the table, we helped ourselves to generous helpings. The first mouthfuls sent all of us running to the toilets where we could spit out the new vegetable and rinse out our mouths. Ang pakla! Sautéed ipil was terribly bitter and positively vile.
However, my mother still maintained that ipil was edible. "I read it in a magazine somewhere," she insisted. "Maybe we should have used younger pods?" Disbelieving her this time, we rummaged for the deceitful publication. We found it soon enough and discovered that ipil was really used as food: For pigs! My mother had inadvertently gone through one of my brother’s feed-mill operation and agribusiness manuals.
The culinary misadventures in our household did not end there. On one occasion when we didn’t have a cook and the houseboy volunteered to man the kitchen, he was instructed to sauté the beef before adding the peas. We were aghast when we saw the result: Broiled milkfish lying on a bed of sautéed beef. While questioning the houseboy, we almost collapsed with laughter as he reasoned, "Eh ma’am, ’di ba sabi mo igisa muna ’yung beef bago ilagay ’yung peas?" ("But didn’t you say I was supposed to sauté the beef before adding the fish [pronounced: peas]?") It was a blunder brought about by differences in regional accents.
Nowadays, my entire family also breaks out in laughter whenever the commercial of the tinola-flavored noodles is aired on television. It is a reminder that not all of my mother’s food inventions are flops, and that other people may actually enjoy something similar to my mom’s inventions. I have to explain that my mother has an extreme aversion to food going to waste and, when we were growing up, had a habit of recycling food. Thus, when we were children and the cook said we were having "retovar" it was a signal for us to gorge on junk food and skip meals. Tinola-flavored noodles are similar to the spaghettinola of my mother’s retovar (recycled) repertoire. It is made with surplus spaghetti noodles hardening in the innermost recesses of the refrigerator that are dropped into the pot of re-heated chicken tinola that was previously congealing in another refrigerator shelf. Clearly as the tinola-flavored noodle/spaghettinola fluke has shown, some food combinations are more acceptable than others; and food experimentation may yield favorable results.
Sadly, however, some of the more common or traditional fare is forgotten as new food concepts become more popular. Because of scarcity of local ingredients and changing cultural traditions, or even because of modern ideas in nutrition, certain dishes are no longer being prepared. As culinary traditions are forgotten, part of our cultural heritage is lost. And thus, the need to preserve and share our culinary traditions.
It is with this in mind that the "Doreen Gamboa Fernandez Food Symposium 2005: Vanishing Food in the Philippines" is being organized. Set for Aug. 27, it is envisioned to be a lively, multimedia symposium revolving around the theme "Vanishing Food in the Philippines." It will be a one-day forum that hopes to find out what has happened to foods from our childhood and our hometowns that are beginning to disappear, the effects of the environment on food, the abundance or scarcity of food in these times, restaurants and eateries that are no longer around, and to find out what happened to comfort foods that are no longer commonly known.
To be able to present a paper or creative work at the symposium, abstracts and project proposals for the symposium are required. These must reach the Secretariat, The Doreen G. Fernandez Food Symposium 2005, Filipinas Heritage Library, Makati Ave., Makati City on or before April 15.
Calling all food lovers, scholars, writers and anybody who is into food: Do you know of any "vanishing food?" Join the symposium and help preserve our culinary and cultural heritage.