Soups and stews

The Good Life with Eli F.J. Tajanlangit

With the chill in the air and the rains in the afternoons that make our evenings cold and damp, it is time for soups and stews to warm our insides. Nothing indeed like the feel of hearty, filling soup that’s tolerably hot to take into our mouths and roll inside out throats and stomachs.

And with the refrigerator still loaded with bits and pieces of ham and such, this indeed is the perfect time to play soup and stew master, to play with the remains of those foods that are ordinarily out of reach and expensive but which reached our tables and kitchens on the back of holiday cheers.

One wonderful memory of Christmas while growing up was watching the ham, served on Christmas Eve whittle down slice by thin slice everyday, until nothing but the bone with some tenacious meat remained. That’s when it was simmered along with tough white beans for hours, until the beans turned tender, and the full flavors of the ham and bones are released to the liquid. Sliced cabbage leaves were thrown into this stew and this made for one hearty soup that, to this day, warms not just the stomach but also the heart.

I have stumbled on some of the more complex versions of this bean and ham bone soup, and I must admit dishes like sopa gallego which includes bone marrow and chicken slices and sausages and olive oil are decidedly more flavorful, but I wouldn’t exchange that humble ham bone and beans of the past.

Beans and legumes like habichuelas, mongo and what we call balatong uyas in the dialect are the most logical ingredients to play with for post-holiday soup. They make for good company to whatever meats are available in the kitchen.

Some intrepid ideas, however, have surfaced in our never-ending search for new taste experiences. I have tried pancetta, the Italian bacon, in our kadios-langka-baboy , the black pea-green jackfruit-and-pork stew, and it is interesting, although someone said it is such a pity and a waste to use such expensive meats in the humble KBL. After all, the KBL is meant to be humble fare.

But that’s precisely the beauty of post-holiday cooking; you have the luxury of playing around these expensive ingredients that are otherwise reserved for our more discriminating dinners. Too, using these foreign ingredients in our local dishes can be a good way of bringing our food to the global dining table, you know, something familiar in them might tickle foreigners’ interests in them. Just as we have taken spaghetti and embraced it as our own by giving them it our own style and shake, who knows what can become of KBL in the hands of Italians.

I’ve also seen pork barbecue slices go to the beans-langka-camote tops dish and I must say they also work well: the flavors of smoked, sweet-salty pork cubes swimming in the soup along with the balatong and dahon camote. It is interesting how a slight difference in ingredients can make a whole world of difference in food.

While we do not usually take soup the way Westerners do – they take it early in the meal – we regard it with as much importance. In fact, some Westerners are fascinated by the fact that oftentimes, salad, soup as well as main course come as one in our dining tables.

In case you haven’t noticed yet, our tinola or sinigang, meats boiled in sour soup and topped with leaves, is one example of this three-in-one wonder: we take the greens that top them as salad, perhaps dressing them on the side with vinegar, then take the broth as soup and then attack the meat for main course. No more plate changing, of course.*

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