Serving Pinoy

The Good Life with Eli F.J. Tajanlangit

So, what do we serve foreigners who want to discover our cuisine? If we shouldn't shock them with foods like balut, or boiled fertilized duck's egg, betamax, which is grilled chicken blood, or dinuguan, or blood stew, what should we serve?

There really is no book that could tell us what, no manual really, except our own good old common sense. First thing to remember: let us do away with the shock value. That may work when we introduce foreigners to our history -- ...and Yankees burned the entire Samar island! The Japanese chopped off our grandfathers' heads! -- but I don't think the same strategy would work well when introducing them to our cuisine, especially if we want to engage them and eventually make them a market for our food products.

How do we do this? Simple. We do not serve them the unfamiliar. We do not serve them a dark stew like dinuguan when they -- sometimes even we ourselves -- do not know what goes in there. After all, even among us Pinoys, we wouldn't eat dinuguan prepared by people we don't know, do we, lest we ingest things we do want to take.

We also do not serve what their cultures have not accepted, like duck embryos that, in a matter of days, would have quacked already had we not boiled the egg. Or fish with big eyes staring longingly back at them. A word of caution here: most people in the west do not serve fish with heads and tails or skin on. They serve boneless fillets so that the average American pupil, years back, drew a flat square when asked to draw a fish.

I would think some foods that are familiar to them, like chicken and fish, would make a nice intro to Pinoy cuisine. Our lechon manok, that looks similar to roast chicken but has the inimitable sour and aromatic stuffing made of sour fruits, leaves and lemon grass, should be interesting.

And then there are the dishes we developed from the ways of our colonizers: the different forms of relleno, torta and the like, can ticke the foreigners' interest instead of turning them off. Some friends, who sometimes entertain Spaniards, say valenciana always draws interest among them, as dishes like chicken pastel.

The way we do our spaghetti, often sweet, spicy and a tad sour with bits of meat, should also be interesting.

I would like to think, however, that our 'virgin' ways with food should come off strong among foreigners, as long as we use the very fresh ingredients: sinigang, paksiw, inihaw can be outstanding dishes; in fact, even inimitable, because they are truly ours and freshness is not transportable. With these dishes, foreigners will truly partake of, not just our food, but of our place and culture.

I don't think they came all the way to our shores to eat hamburgers and fries and if they do eat these, I don't think they'll have memories to talk about that, unless, perhaps if they have some awful experience with them.

I understand that when the Thais started promoting their food, they looked into not just the longevity of their ingredients or how long they can stay good on the shelf. The Thais, in fact, looked into their flavors and checked which ones would work well on the palates of foreigners. Thus, it is said there are a hundred ways that Pad Thai and Tom Yum soup are done in Thailand and they do not taste the way these dishes are done in the US and even here in the Philippines.

Some adjustments had to be done for the Thai food to sell in the world market. This, of course, is about exporting food.

If we are to export our food, we begin by first engaging them with what we serve them when we come. That's when we give them flavors that will give them pleasurable memories, not nightmares like ingesting a duckling that was stopped from fully growing because it was boiled for dinner.*

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