Perfect combos

The Good Life with Eli F.J. Tajanlangit

Interesting, don’t you think, is our penchant and practice of pairing foods together when we serve them, like they must go together or they aren’t good, or worse, incomplete. I mean, we can eat dinuguan – pork blood stew – as an item for a meal, and we eat it just as it is or with rice and that’s it. But once served for merienda, it must have puto – steamed rice cake – or something’s awfully missing. Of course, many hosts would serve dinuguan always with puto, at whatever meal. It’s like one is incomplete without the other, two completely disparate foods coming together in one plate, on one table, complementing and completing each other, the way true love bonds two people. What was that cheesy line from a Tom Cruise movie – “You complete me!”

There is a Visayan line for food pairings: Sampat guid! – They match very well – Angayan! – They are good together.

That is true with dinuguan and puto – the soft, slightly creamy, slightly sweet cake providing the perfect counterpoint to the usually sour, multi-textured dish that is the blood-based stew. Even their colors are a nice contrast: white cake, black stew.

I guess the play of textures and flavors in food combinations is the secret why they are so good, we keep coming back to them. Together, they make each other interesting -- try eating dinuguan by itself or puto alone and let’s see how far you can go before you get satiated or full. That is a cue, by the way: when these foods are served as combos, you eat more.

There is also ibus – steamed sticky rice cooked in coconut milk – and ripe mango. The contrasts here are not as pronounced as in puto and dinuguan. Here, the creamy sticky rice, with salty whispers, go well with the sweet, juicy ripe mango. Their textures, that are almost mushy in different ways, go well as well.

Sure ibus can be served with plain sugar but lain guid ya, it is truly different, when it is served with the natural sugars of the ripe mango. Somehow, the sticky, creamy rice comes alive when it is drenched in the sweet juices and flesh of the fruit.

Of course, as our taste adventures continue, we have found more sampat guid combinations. You now have pate – and boy! we now make a lot of versions of this French delight – and toasted bread or crunchy little items like crostinis.

Even chips, which used to be stand-alone snacks that went well with soda, now must be served with dips and salsas. I recall how chips, which were introduced in the Philippine mass market as Chippy, now come in many, many forms, most of them from abroad, but a few now made locally, even in home kitchens. But interestingly, it is now de regiuer to serve it with dips or salsas, a perfect combination like the puto and dinuguan. Even more interesting is the range of dips Pinoys can come up with to go with their chips, from simple tomato-coriander-lime salsas to complicated preparations using cottage cheese and sour cream and yogurt.

This kind of food combining says so much of our culinary culture, and well, our culture in general. It tells of how we value variety and how two or more things must be on our dining table most of the time. Look, we have even reengineered the foreign pate and chips, and even the salsas and dips that go with them for variety. Even our humblest meals must have appetizers, even if just simple chopped tomatoes and salt.

You can say anything about Pinoy foodie, but you can never say his table is boring or uninteresting.*

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