The Pilgrim's Pots and Pans

[Edited: Originally a food blog meme then revised for my SunStar column published in 14 December 2006.]

In the Philippines, the Christmas season starts in September, so I am inviting SunStar readers to share with us their food anecdotes. It is most probably these stories that help define the Capampangan/Filipino family and which are most relevant during the holiday season. They may be about food but they are more than food. They are a reflection of our culture and traditions, which after all define our identity as a family and as a people.

To start the ball rolling, I’ll tell you some of mine. There are just so many memories of food from my childhood that I’ll have to concentrate on the highlights.

1. Eating with the whole clan. I was born in the mid-1970s and as far back as I can remember, our family gatherings were relatively simple but the table was always overflowing. Each time someone came home from abroad, we’d have an impromptu family/clan reunion and food would be one of the highlights.
   
   Everyone would cook or bring something aside from what was prepared by my grandmother that we’d have leftovers enough to last us a week. Even with that, of course we’d still cook each day.
   
   Times have changed, some have passed on to the next life, children have grown and have children of their own. But we’re still at it. A few years ago, while looking at our family snapshots, one of my officemates exclaimed how wonderful it was to eat in the open air with the tables always laden with glorious food on fiestas in the province. I was surprised. Which of our pictures was she was looking at? Not a fiesta at all, I said. That’s just lunch.

2. “What is your specialty dish?” You should not have one, according to my Lola. Just when I started to cook unsupervised, a relative who came to eat at the house appreciatively said sigang was my specialty. He must’ve been humouring the little girl who cooked, tee hee! For a day or so I went around thinking I had a specialty. I then asked my grandmother what was hers. Oh, was I in for a lecture!
   
   Lola said the notion of having one specialty was foolish. One had to give the best of her abilities (’her’ refers to the little girl being lectured) to anything she was cooking. It was excellent that I cooked sigang well enough to earn praise but I wasn’t going to cook it for every meal everyday. I can’t just be cooking mediocre meals the rest of the time. In other words, ’specialty’ meant everything one can cook. Anything less was not tolerated. Tall order, but many years later, that girl still tries to follow her Lola’s dictum.
3. Gifts of food. I was perhaps five or six when one of my mother’s cousins was about to get married and I was to be the flower girl. As soon as the wedding date was finalised, my uncle’s then-fiancée-now-wife went to our house and brought me some tibuc-tibuc. Oh, did I feel special! I then pronounced tibuc-tibuc my favourite.
   
   Through the years, I can recall many incidents of being gifted with food – pastries, fruits, suman, pisalubung (an extremely sticky glutinous rice cake), live seafood, candies, delicacies from across the globe. Each article of food I was given I savoured with relish but what makes each gift special is the love that the giver seals the package with.
4. Fifty-centavo goto. We live around a hundred metres away from our school and went home for lunch. My mother had a clever scheme to prevent me and my brother from eating junk food – she packed our snacks for recess and didn’t give us any money till the third grade. But every now and then, once a week perhaps, she’d give me fifty centavos (PhP .50) to buy a substantial bowl of goto, which the school canteen sold piping hot.
   
   Nowadays, fifty centavos (salapi in the vernacular) would only be enough for a piece of the cheapest hard candy. But for me, a salapi – which incidentally is not being minted anymore – brings warm memories of recess periods spent carelessly chatting with school friends, perhaps worth more than a treasure chest of gold. 

5. Dining with cousins. In my childhood, when our more formal lolos and lolas were still alive, on ordinary days (no occasion for celebrating) we were forbidden from eating at other people’s houses unless they were very close relatives or friends. If we were at a playmate’s house, we had to be home before mealtimes or else… oh poor pinched earlobes! This seems to have been a very common practice in our town based on the number of sore earlobe stories I’ve been told recently.
   
   Among our playmates, we were only allowed to eat at very few houses. One of these was at my grandmother’s first cousin, Lola Uring. Together with her four grandchildren, our cousins, we played and ate heartily. Although this was on ordinary days, our meals had to be eaten on the dining table, we had to use utensils properly, chew our food well – not loudly like a goat, not wipe our mouths on our sleeves, politely participate in the conversation and generally mind our manners. We had no problem with that.
   
   Looking back, perhaps we were allowed to eat at our cousins’ because my grandmother knew we had to observe the same rules we had at home. In her book, we were not in danger of running into bad dining companions.

Come on and tell us your stories! They can be from long ago or current. Either way, we’d love to hear about them.