Turning gravy to soup

The Good Life with Eli F.J. Tajanlangit

I don't know if it was an actual photo or a doctored one, but I thought it spoke so much about our eating habits and even our culinary culture.

In what is supposedly a Kentucky Fried Chicken billboard was written this: “Paki-usap. Wag sanang gawing sabaw ang gravy. Please: Don't take gravy as soup.”

I'm sure plenty of Pinoys got the message in this appeal/instruction/guideline and related to it right away. After all, you can go to any KFC outlet anytime and see the myriad of ways we have developed with the gravy.

There are those who take gravy as soup, a habit that is just one of the many we have imbibed in the continuing onslaught of Western influences on our culture. We embrace foreign influences and turn them on their head, creating new dishes for example out of old ingredients, and in this instance, new ways with old manners. I am sure foreigners will find it amusing, or may be odd on the one hand, and nausea-inducing on the other, when they find us slurping on gravy or even coating our rice with it.

Just for the experience, I must say I've tried eating gravy by the spoonfuls, yes, like it was soup. I wasn't able to get past the second spoon. For one, it was too salty. For another, it tasted like flour dissolved in water, heated to a thick consistency and then flavored by salt and what-not.

But I could understand if people mistake it as soup. It has the same consistency as those cream soups from the can, and just as salty and I supposed, loaded with plenty of chemical flavorings.

Now, isn't that a sad development? How we are replacing our tinola and sinigang with pale imitations of the Western cream soup?

Aside from using it as soup, or to wet our rice, many of us also use gravy as dip for French fries – another “shocking” habit to those who grew up in cultures where fried potato strips are meant only to be dipped in tomato ketchup or melted cheeses or kissed by salt.

Even that penchant to add gravy to the mashed potato, a habit we usually see also in KFC, can provoke raised eyebrows among foreigners. You mix mashed potato with gravy? an incredulous somebody once asked me as she watched me putting a bit of gravy into the mashed potato. To most foreigners, putting gravy, even just a dab of it, on mashed potato violates the taste and flavor of this cream-butter-potato number. To us Pinoys, a dab, even a drizzle, of gravy is what this drab dish needs to be flavorful.

I don't know with you, but as it is, I do not exactly like mashed potato, or potatoes for that matter. I'd have good old camote anytime, simply boiled or broiled. I'm sure a lot of you feel the same way, although some people won't admit this publicly. True to our skewered sense of priorities and distorted culinary values, some Pinoys profess a preference for potatoes instead of camote, considering its ordinariness in this part of the planet.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying potatoes are no good. I'm just being honest in saying that given my Pinoy genes and small-town sense, I find potatoes bland, mashed potatoes even more so, unless they are jacked up by some magic spice…and maybe, gravy?

That preference for potatoes and our many other uses for gravy, aside from using it for meat, are just two of the things that developed in the globalization of our culinary culture.

We have welcomed and embraced foreign foods into our culture, even when they are not the real ones, and I am sure we are the poorer for this. Just imagine how much our own farmers and fishermen are losing every time we prefer gravy over the real goodness of home-cooked soups.*

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