Most of us in India would have had food cooked by Filipino chefs at some time or the other. This is not the same as saying that we have all tried Filipino food! In fact, a large majority of us would definitely not have had a chance to sample the diverse flavours of the Philippines, unless we have travelled to that country or to other global melting pots, especially in Australia or America. And even there, the cuisine is one of the most underrepresented Asian cuisines.
Filipino chefs, on the other hand, abound everywhere, including in India, where it is a common practice to employ them in Chinese/Japanese/Thai/pan-Asian restaurants in a bid to authenticate those cuisines because they are easier and cheaper to employ. They?ll cheerfully man the woks, stand behind the hot teppas, chatting with you even as they cook your food, and they will even learn to dole out popular Indian-Chinese flavours, the way we love them in all their fried glory. But fact is that Filipino food, per se, is nothing like other Asian flavours that you may have tried. In fact, it is one of the most unique cuisines of Asia.
A mix of Eastern and Western flavours, and cooking techniques, the cuisine is milder than anything found in its neighbouring countries. But the absence of chillies is made up for by a fascinating mix of Spanish, American, Chinese and Malay influences that seeped into the original Austronesian food of the region and that today define it. After all, with nearly 400 years of outside influences, including periods of colonisation by the Spanish and the Americans, the Philippines is a true melting pot.
I got a chance to sample some of the most popular dishes of the country at a recent promotion organised by Philippine Airlines and WelcomHotel Sheraton, New Delhi, to give those of us in India a taste of the country?s cuisine and culture. And while the dishes were unique, it was also interesting to trace linkages between those and some our own dishes, particularly from the south of the Vindhyas.
Chef Myrna Dizon Segismundo, quite a celebrity in her home country, had flown down to prepare some of her own family recipes as well as improvisations. With a television career firmly in place and the author of some authoritative tomes on the cuisine of her country, chef Myrna is apparently pretty well-known in her field of work and as we sat down to a simple meal, she began the process of educating us on the sociology of what we were eating. If tomatoes, olive oil and garlic (the last is abundantly used in the cuisine) came from Spain, baking and dairy came to the Philippines from America. And the south-east Asian provenance of the food is clear from the emphasis on rice, which is the staple here, along with meat such as pork and goat meat (like in India, there is no lamb in the cuisine) and chicken. The Chinese brought in soy sauce, but since this country was not part of the ancient spice trade, use of spices is really minimal, except perhaps in the southern-most Muslim-dominated regions.
The thing with Filipino food is that it is mostly a three-way marriage. Like the Spanish sofrito (that refers to garlic, onion and tomatoes cooked in olive oil, used as a base for many dishes), the cuisine of the Philippines is dominated by these three ingredients that form the base for sauces and many dishes. Ironically enough, if you were to draw some parallels with north Indian cooking, at least, as popularised by Punjabi dhabas and later restaurants, you will find that our basic masala for curries, too, is based on this sofrito. The Mughals, who have influenced north Indian cooking to such a great deal, preferred yoghurt as a base and souring agent for their curries and qormas. And in the south, we have tamarind, kokum, et al. Tomatoes, according to the redoubtable KT Achaya, only appeared in our mass cooking in colonial times, when British memsahibs used these as specially-cultivated garden vegetables. But clearly, trade between Europe and Asia has had wider ramifications that we can directly quantify.
On the other hand, one of the unique cooking methods of the Philippines is sangkutsha, a way to preserve meat in vinegar and salt. Large chunks of mutton or pork are boiled in salt and oil. Vinegar as a preservative dates back to the pre-Spanish days, unlike in India, where it is only used in the cuisine of Goa as a souring agent and goes back to the Portuguese past.
The first course chef Myrna presented before us comprised fresh lumpia, a kind of Filipino spring rolls, that can also be fried like the conventional Chinese eats. What you can also equate the fresh rolls, made with flour, not rice paper, is to the French crepes. Sauteed vegetables, hearts of coconut (almost every part of the coconut plant is used by Filipinos), garlic and peanuts are stuffed inside and a combination of soy sauce and caramalised sugar is poured on top to give this a unique taste. This makes for an absolutely first-class and startlingly flavoured appetiser.
For the next course, I tried a sinigang soup, which is really a broth of vegetables (including okra) and seafood in tamarind water. Ginger and tomatoes are used to flavour the soup, which reminded me in a strange way of rasam, albeit with squid and prawn floating in the water! But if the humble upma can be revved up with mushrooms and fashioned into a cross-cultural delicacy winning for its creator Top Chef honours, the day, perhaps, will not be far when we have a rasam-prawn soup!
Adobo is one of the best-known Filipino dishes. The terms actually refers to a technique of cooking, braising any dish. And though there are hundreds of versions of this dish, what we had comprised chicken pieces stewed in soy sauce, and garlic, seasoned with black pepper and bay leaves?a non-hot chilli chicken equivalent if you ask me!
Though bibingka (pudding made of ground rice, sugar and coconut milk, baked in a clay oven, topped with fresh, salted duck eggs) are the most famous Filipino desserts (you could draw parallels with bebinca, a Goan Christmas delicacy, at least, when it comes to the nomenclature even though the Goan layered cake is made from flour), the dessert I sampled was a crispy banana and jackfruit roll, which brought back the flavours of Mangalore in a strange way. But then that?s perhaps the beauty of Filipino food. For us Indians, it would be at once familiar and exotic.
The writer is a food critic