BAGOONG. It's a threat, a dare, an invitation. The pungent aroma of this infamous fermented seafood paste is at once vile and intoxicating and is all the reason anyone needs to loathe or love Filipino cuisine.
In spite of the Filipinos' large and lengthy presence in the United States, the food of the Philippines remains mysterious and misunderstood, the butt of barbaric jokes about bagoong, blood (dinuguan), balut and black dogs.
While it is un-P.C. to poke fun at others' food, many Filipinos are the first to deliver a barb or two. At Cristina's Chicharon, where deep-fried pork backs are a specialty, owner Philip Butay knows the way to get a laugh out of non-Filipino browsers is by offering duck balut, a hard-boiled, feathered embryo.
"I've lived here 22 years. The jokes don't faze me," he said.
Rather than a source of embarrassment, the jokes are a point of pride. To consume blood and intestines is to be a kindred spirit.
Filipino Cuisine: Recipes From the Islands, By Gerry G. Gelle (Red Crane Books), 352 pages, hardcover $29.95In a community that grew up in America with no center, no home base, food is an important source of identity.
Author Gerry Gelle has a theory that for most immigrant groups arriving in America, getting to know each other through food came first. Assimilation came later. The Filipinos got it exactly backward, blending in without paying the requisite culinary dues.
So while early Chinese and Japanese immigrants shared pork buns, musubi and okazu; and the white man's penchant for meat and potatoes paved the way for fast-food burgers and fry joints on every street corner; Filipino cuisine has been conspicuously underrepresented on our tables.
Gelle has written a cookbook with 279 recipes to eliminate some of the dread that comes from puzzling over stews of alien ingredients. "Filipino Cuisine: Recipes from the Islands" also documents the history of a cuisine rich with influences both east and west, that continues to evolve. The author will be in Hawaii in September to promote his book.
Gelle, a second-generation Filipino who lives in Alameda, Calif., grew up on his mom's cooking, and didn't start cooking until he left for college, where he hated dorm food and wanted to impress the girls with his kitchen finesse.
His skills became legendary. In a phone interview, Gelle said, "Everyone liked the recipes and would ask for them, but I got tired of writing them down."
An easy solution, he thought, was to find a Filipino cookbook and copy the recipes. Problem was, he couldn't find any. At his local Barnes & Noble, he said, "There were three Ethiopian cookbooks, dozens of Thai cookbooks. There are millions of Filipinos in America, but no cookbook to reflect that.
By Kathryn Bender, Star-Bulletin
A five-step process goes into the making of chicharon,
which has been made by the Butay family for 100 years.
The deep-fried pork backs from Cristina's Chicharon
sell for $6.50 a pound.
Smelling market niche, Gelle, a dentist in his other life, decided that if he couldn't find the cookbook, he would write it.The timid person's approach to Filipino cuisine is to look at its similarities with other cuisines. "The Filipinos have always been able to take what is best from other cuisines," Gelle said, pointing out a shared love for egg rolls (lumpia) and noodle (pancit) dishes with the Chinese, cassava with South Americans and paella and vinegary pork sausages with the Spanish, who colonized the Philippines in the 1500s.
Nearly 400 years of Spanish rule -- longer than the United States has been a nation -- was enough to leave a lasting taste for sauteed tomatoes and garlic, flan, enseymadas (cheese buns) and foods preserved in vinegar and salt.
The Philippines were turned over to the U.S. in 1898, in a treaty ending the Spanish-American War. By the time the Philippines gained its independence in 1946, its people were thoroughly westernized.
"If anything's baked it's gotta be Spanish," Gelle said. "Can you imagine standing in front of an oven at 90 degrees in the tropics?"
Recipes for Filipino dishes tend to be long and involved, and Butay -- whose retail store also stocks the basic ingredients for Filipino cooking, such as mackerel, milkfish, bagoong and an assortment of dessert fruit in jars -- said his customers like it that way. In fact, they'll go out of their way to make the work harder on themselves.
"Patis (fish sauce) is for lazy people. Most people rather buy the big jar (nine pounds) of bagoong. They add more salt and mash it up for more flavor."
The brown liquid from the fermented fish floats to the top and is used as fish sauce, while the bagoong sediments sink to the bottom.
The most popular bagoong according to Butay is Amor Nino Foods' bagoong terong, or salted bonnet mouth fish. This too, has heavy sediments which can be mashed to taste.
Gelle has other philosophies as to why Filipino food has never won over the American palate.
"When a Thai person starts a business, they aim for the American market. When a Filipino creates a business, his first thought is to cater to the Filipino community. The problem with that is, why would any Filipino go to a restaurant when they could make the same food at home? It's the immigrant mentality -- save money, don't go out to eat." Few have thought, he said, to adjust the home recipes to make them more suitable a broader market. As far as visual presentation now goes, dark sauces against clear noodles and unknown chopped matter add up to a murky mess.
Flavorwise, he says, adjustments for a western palate would include omitting anything excessively bitter, and punching up flavors by adding more spices or chiles.
"Filipinos also don't like their sweets super sweet. For the American taste, you have to pump it up.
"And bagoong, you have to be careful with that. The hardest part is when it comes to smell. I think it's fine; it makes my mouth water, but it offends others."
Now that he has one book done, he is already at work on another on fusion cooking, in which Asian ingredients meet Western techniques.
Again, he started his research at the book store. "There were only two books on the shelves, and guess what? Roy Yamaguchi wrote both of them."
This sudden impulse to write cookbooks doesn't mean Gelle will give up dentistry however. "Let's say Filipino food becomes the next big trend. It'll last three years if I'm lucky. I'm only 30. What happens when it's over?
"But people will always have bad teeth."
A glossary of basic ingredients for Filipino cooking: Food facts
Ampalaya (bittermelon): This firm, green gourdlike vegetable is prized for its bitterness. The more immature the fruit, the more bitter and desirable.
