by Rene J. Navarro

I’ve heard about the Filipinos’ nostalgia for Philippine food after a period of stay in a foreign country, that yearning for certain native dishes prepared at home by mother or cousin or an uncle or eaten in a favorite restaurant. I was skeptical of such reports and thought they were exaggerated, although they were common enough. Salivating over Aling Maring’s dinuguan or missing Indang Carning’s suman sa ibus or a home-made patis from Batangas was something I could not comprehend. It seemed all so silly to me. Earlier in my life in the US, sometime in late 1970, I did not miss Philippine food possibly because it was available and so these tales sounded all the more absurd. Boiled rice (it was Texas longgrain, but okay), linagang baka or manok, adobong baboy or manok, and isdang prito or grilled pork chop (dipped in vinegar with pressed garlic) were often part of our usual diet. There were ingredients missing in some dishes it is true, but we found substitutes.

So, my wife and I regarded this strange craving that we were warned about as more imagined than real, and we began to joke about it. Imagine being told to include in your luggage a bottle of patis and green mangoes to ward off those legendary pangs when you arrived in America. It was as absurd as the suggestion that we should bring tailored clothes from Manila because US ready-made clothes were ill-fitting and amboy. How about being gifted with Nora Daza’s cookbook at the Manila International Airport? The main drawbacks of migration, to me, were emotional-sociological (loneliness was a big thing, so was anomie, whatever it meant) and political-cultural (losing connection with our country), not gastronomical. But just a few months after my arrival in New Jersey in late August 1970, I began to crave something like sinigang na bangus with patis spiced with pepper on the side and Pampanga pork sausages dipped in a sauce of vinegar, siling labuyo, sea salt, and lots of garlic. (Salty, spicy and sour seem to be the common flavors a homesick palate seeks.) Not really a major crisis in my life but it was there just the same, something puzzling and unexplainable, and it caught me unawares. Your nose — or imagination — picked up certain scents and you began to fantasize about a certain dish. You tasted something that remotely hinted at a native dish, and you wondered where you could get it. It became a Pavlovian reflex. My wife Lolit valiantly and resourcefully came to my aid and concocted what I wanted with ingredients from Shop Rite across the street. It wasn’t the same thing, of course, but when you are in Neptune, New Jersey, you cannot really complain, and you make do with what you have. For sinigang she used lemon instead of crushed sampaloc or camias, for the sausage she used casings — chitlings, I guess — and a mixture of ground pork (a combination of fatty and lean meat) and spices. Instead of bangus, with its clean, pure taste, she used the heavy flavored and oily mackerel (we also used this fish for paksiw). She learned to improvise by using substitute ingredients.

While many things were missing in the local grocery stores, there were compensations though. We lived in Jersey Shore, a few minutes away from the beach. We got fish heads for free at many of the seafood stores in the area. The store owners gave the fish heads away under the impression that they were for Fido. At the Shark River inlet, there were blue claw crabs that we could catch with a raw chicken neck on a string during the “er” months (September, October, November, and December).

The Filipino community in the area used to gather for occasional parties. Somebody would bring calderetta or kari-kari or pansit, an occasional dinuguan. A kind of bayanihan and a mutual  , it was a potlatch feast with cuisine from different Philippine provinces. Sometimes there would be bottles of San Mig. We would share culinary secrets and where to go for that precious sauce or spice. Such parties happened on a more or less regular basis, especially on somebody’s birthday or a child’s baptism. Invariably, as in the home country, we would all have pabaon of this or that dish.

Mike, a physician in the nearby hospital, would take a few of us for a drive to Philadelphia, where he would buy pig’s blood and intestines for dinuguan, or find a bottle of patis, and other Asian dipping sauces (probably from Thailand or Vietnam) in Chinatown. Those trips were an adventure for me. I did not realize that there was a Little China in Pennsylvania right in the heart of the City of Brotherly Love amid the faux classical Greek/Roman architecture, and masonic and revolutionary monuments.

Pete, another doctor, also had the savvy to direct us to the right places in New York City. (He also knew where the museums were — I learned about Guggenheim because of him.) Getting to eat an authentic Philippine dish was just a matter of knowing where to get the right ingredients. At that point, a year or so after my arrival in the US, I had enough information to know where to get most of everything I needed for almost any recipe I needed to cook. I did not miss many of our native dishes because they could be recreated wherever it was we lived.

Besides, there were other cuisines that we explored: Italian, Japanese, Korean and different varieties of Chinese. It was a sporadic education that began in the late 60s in the Philippines and continued when we arrived in the US.

The following was excerpted from Rene J. Navarro’s insightful memoir Of Fire and Water.

READ MORE IN RENE NAVARRO’S INSIGHTFUL BOOK!