A slow dinner

We had the privilege of dining at the ancestral home of the Gamboas called Casa A. Gamboa in Silay City when we visited Negros to observe the volunteer program of the NVC Foundation.

Together with MAP members we reserved for a Slow Dinner, and my companions asked why it was called slow. It had nothing to do with the speed of service. It was because the theme of the dinner is “Slow Food.”

Reena Gamboa, Slow Food Negros president, and a relative of Doreen Gamboa-Fernandez who was one of the first ones to start Slow Food in the Philippines, walked us through the menu for the evening. We had the privilege of trying local fruits and vegetables, like kamias, that were pickled to go along with the grilled fish and meats. There was kadyos or black eyed peas in the soup. And the surprise of the evening was a capiz shell with the meat still stuck to the shell like a scallop. We showed photos of capiz windowpanes to our Australian guest, and showed him how these shells were used as they are transluscent and were useful to let a little light through while keeping you out of neighbors’ sight.

We also had heirloom red rice which we enjoyed with all the viands and so started our dinner conversation about Slow Food. The movement started in 1989 in Italy and Filipino foodies like Reena’s aunt Doreen and chef Beth Romualdez brought it to Manila in the early 90s. The ECHOstore trio joined in 2012 when the Philippines also started having a stand at the Salone del Gusto in Turin (every other year) and we have been advocates ever since. Thanks to legislators like Loren Legarda and public servants like Bernadette Romulo-Puyat, we have been represented at the Turin event every time there is a Terra Madre event.

What do we do? We gather heirloom and “soon to be forgotten” food like capiz or lamparong, Liberica or Barako coffee, kadyos and other grains and pulses and we remind people how to eat or drink them (in the case of coffee and fruit juices and wines like bignay and rice wine like basi). They are listed in a catalog called the Ark of Taste (www.fondazioneslowfood.org). And we see how 160 countries are doing the same thing – saving their old varieties and culture – to create a more biodiverse world of food. Otherwise, we will only have five crops in the world – corn, soy, rice, potatoes and wheat. Saving a culture’s original food habits and continuing to grow them is the key to biodiversity.

Just yesterday a friend, Flor Tarriela, gifted me with a with two seedlings of a fruit we know as mansanitas or small apples. She found them like a weed in Batangas, sowed the seeds and voila! we now have planting materials to propagate a forgotten fruit. The other week I was gifted with durian seedlings to plant in Amadeo, Cavite from seeds grown by Manny Torrejon from durian he enjoyed. And the other day I was given a rubber plant… OK, I have not yet eaten anything of rubber, but tree gifts are always welcome.

And this is how we can all participate in Slow Food, biodiversity and the production and consumption of good, clean and fair food – the three legs of the Slow Food philosophy. Thank you to people like Reena Gamboa and our new councilor for Southeast Asia Ramon Uy Jr. for spearheading not only Slow Food but Slow Travel as well in Negros and all of Western Visayas.

All it takes is for people to know that we are saving a heritage of food and culture. It also helps that getting “slower” food in our system will wean our children away from fast food, and maybe discover old fruits like duhat, macopa and mabolo. It was good to have discussed this with other young progressive retailers who are now looking to sell these fruits so our children may remember the fruits of the past, for example. These are aratiles, mansanitas, santol, bayabas bignay and the seasonal sampinit berries from the wild.

Chefs like Rhea SyCip makes a sampinit cake when it is in season. And I recently tasted santol sorbet from a local ice cream maker. Innovative chefs and artisan food producers do make saving these food a breeze for consumers to sample. Chef Rhea also has a pili marzipan, an ube kinampay cake and more. I can go on and on with today’s chefs who preserve food traditions like fish sinaing with sundried kamias, and of course our adobo which has a hundred or more versions.

The latest one I tried is adobo with atchuete (annatto seeds), with no soy sauce. These are cooked from old family recipes and should be preserved and tasted by our younger generation. This adobo of Jo Mamar used a young tender native chicken variety and is absolutely worth coming back for. So what’s the problem with eating native chickens? We grow them big or cook the mature ones, the meat of which is already so tough. Try what Jo did – cook them young and a native chicken will be your next favorite meat. They also only eat grub and vegetables. No feeds, no antibiotics.

Eating slow is a habit we can all adopt. That means knowing where our ingredients come from and encouraging the use of local fruits, old varieties and preserving old recipes and how to do things more deliberately and slowly. I would consider anything that takes time to be slow (like my friend’s Chinese lumpia) but more than the length of time to cook something, let’s look at how long it took for the chicken to grow (60 days vs 21) and the meat to age. Let us slow down and preserve our indigenous fruits, choose local meats and make it a more biodiverse world.

Try and cook a slow dinner. It’s life changing.