Recipes from my mothers

In the house we grew up in was the oddly named area most Filipino homes have – the dirty kitchen. I think we called it such because it’s where the firewood- and charcoal-fueled stoves laid, compared to the cleaner kitchen where the gas stove rested. The “DK,” as we referred to it, was the center of gravity of our two mothers, both exceptional cooks of the family.

Their singularity in creating dishes isn’t in the league of gourmet chefs but along the lines of ingenuity that slow food advocate and friend Chit Juan hails in terms of utilizing home-grown, backyard ingredients and infusing them into our cuisine.

If master chefs embarrass their protégés, or worse, toss the food into the bin when the dish they create turns out unpalatable, Nanay and Mommy would still commend us for our labor. I’d know by their facial expression if my fish cocido’s too sour, meaning I must have added juice from 20 pieces of freshly-squeezed kalamansi instead of just 12. Nanay, upon tasting the soup, would jiggle her head in a kilig fashion then squint her eyes, while Mommy would slurp the broth with gusto as if it were the piece de resistance!

Our family has established our own Michelin star for kare-kare, which restaurants in our country couldn’t match. For Nanay’s kare-kare, it all starts with how the beef or pork is cooked hours ahead. I first heard of  sangkucha as a cooking method from Nanay. It sounded peculiarly funny to me. I had always wished to look up its etymology (but that was pre-search engine days). But I really didn’t have to. I simply watched her cook. The technique involves unhurriedly sautéing the garlic and onion then braising the meat until its natural juices unite with the spices and reaches a certain consistency. Then comes the next step, which is to slow cook the meat. She was emphatic to never rush the stewing process.

A few weeks back, my Ate posted a photo of her kare-kare at the family chat which, my Kuya teased, was sinigang sa miso by the sight of the pale sauce. This brought my youngest brother to a childhood memory of picking bunches of bristly achuete fruits (safran, in our dialect) direct from the shrub at a tita’s yard. The achuete’s distinct crimson tint (seeds are soaked in very hot oil or water to extract the color), when combined with fried peanuts and roasted glutinous rice (grains have to achieve a specific aroma and brownness), marvelously completes the entire symphony of Nanay’s kare-kare sauce.

The older boys are usually tasked with laboriously grinding the roasted rice and fried peanuts to a precise texture using a century-old manual grinder or gilingan, an heirloom from our grandmother.

We all concede, we could never replicate Nanay’s kare-kare, yet the dish she cooked from scratch taught us prized lessons in teamwork, patience, excellence and to regard cooking not as a chore but the finest expression of love. As in any accepting mother she tolerated our mischiefs, like when she would pretend to not see us munch handfuls of fried peanuts or the few times when my little sister and I would dip our fingers into the bowl of achuete and playfully smear the rosy extract on our lips and cheeks!

While I’m not fond of meat, I occasionally crave for Mommy’s pork humba. The blending of sweetness, sourness, saltiness and the kick at every bite of the chewy meat with a thin fat that melts in the mouth evokes a mystery. I often wonder how that perfect balance of flavors is achieved. Mommy admits her humba is laced with an assortment of sauces, spoonfuls of brown sugar and a medley of spices. Her humba repertoire doesn’t involve any measurement of ingredients. Like any seasoned cook, she trusts her palate, adds a dash of this or a trickle of that, until the desired taste is ultimately achieved.

For those with health concerns, her divine dish may seem cholesterol-triggering or blood sugar-spiking, yet I often think of it as a perfect metaphor for marriage and living. I think, like Mommy’s well-blended humba, what typify every authentic domestic landscape are sweet moments to cherish, sour experiences to acknowledge and salty flashes of frustrations to unleash. As for the spices that come in the form of trials, life would be dreary without them.

Memories of my mothers’ home cooking again came to life when I recently attended an event organized by the New York Public Library in celebration of World Literature and Arts Festival Month and because May is when mothers are honored in most parts of the world (in Indonesia though, where we were previously posted, Mother’s Day is celebrated every Dec. 22).

In “The Future of Food? It’s in the Kitchen,” three multi-cultural chefs and cookbook authors (a Texan-Assyrian, Australian-Cantonese and Jamaican-Canadian) shared insights on how we can be more imaginative and creative in cooking, particularly in the light of scarcity and diversity of ingredients.

Opining that eating out has become expensive in big cities like New York, one speaker started cooking and inviting family and friends at home, while another advised us to learn the art of substitution – “go into different ways, whatever is available in your fridge, garden or pantry.” One chef said her aim is “to present vegetable-based recipes with very interesting flavors,” citing ingenious ways of cooking tofu, which incidentally has become one of my favorites, since having lived in Beijing.

All three speakers talked about their nostalgia of food, how their cultures influence the dishes they create and cook and how their respective mothers had remarkably inspired their vocation as parents, writers and food connoisseurs. Like the NYPL panelist-chefs and for many mothers I know, cooking means love and love equates to cooking. From them we learn recipes that fill not only the hungry tummy but recipes for life in its entirety.