Apicio

Not only did the overall quality of rice changed, a lot of other food items changed too, probably to catch up with prevailing taste and demand or probably just to cut corners and cost of production. PPPans’ lola’s assertion about present day tocino agrees with my mother’s principled opposition to it, that it contains way too much sugar now. How can something with so much sugar not taste good? That’s probably the cue that tocino makers are responding to when doing the add-more-sugar trick. But the sugar burns long before the meat is fully cooked! On top of that, instead of allowing natural fermentation (to acidify it) and full oxidation of the nitrite preservatives (to avoid greying) they cut the curing short and add this totally revolting artificial colour that turns the meat unappetizingly livid. Our unsweetened version from the fifties and sixties was actually called burong baboy. Same too sweet complaint for today’s longanisa. Our’s used no sugar, only lean pork, backfat, vinegar, garlic, pepper, salt and a tiny bit of saltpeter and if you want some zing, hot paprika, this last imparted the reddish tinge. But I guess they were so good too because the pork that went into them was already tasty to start with since it came from “free-range” pigs (gumagala). Our other dried meats show a marked Spanish incursion though because pindang is limited to horse meat while all the rest are called tapa (may that be beef, water buffalo and game such as deer or wild boar). And still on the tapa trail, in the seasonal drylands of Brazil which encompasses a vast territory given to pasture, they also preserve beef by drying and they call this carne do sol. Imagine my drooling surprise finding out that they serve it exactly the way we cook corned beef hash, minced and sautéed with lots of onion strands. Taste exactly the same too. Just delicious.

There are other cuisines that use lye or similar alkaline solutions. The nixtamalization process that maize goes through to become hominy. Usually, in this process lime is used instead of lye, though. ← Yes, as I subsequently discovered in my search to find answer to my original question. Foremost among them is what you just mentioned and also for firming up fruits for candying (squash, winter melon and breadfruit) where lime (cal) is the preferred alkali. The ludefisck (sp?) of the Scandinavians is another that quickly comes to mind. Apparently they also use an alkali spray to make pretzels take on that glossy varnished look. But Danjou's red flag about borax is quite sobering.

In addition, farmers consider a lot of factors in deciding what crop to plant from year to year. The most important factors are market demand and suitability to the parcel of land he is tilling. In other words, he will only plant what will grow well in his paddies and only what will command the best price at harvest time. It is conceivable that the rice quality has changed in the last twenty or thirty years and because your mother has stayed away for an extended period, she is now more apt to find the accumulated change shocking. But the loss of diversity in rice culture was well underway even when I was growing up in the fifties and sixties. This was one of the problems that the International Rice Research Institute was trying to address with its gene bank. I remember one of the first strains of rice they developed was a high-yield variety that was called Miracle Rice but since it did not conform to the expected flavour and texture of traditional varieties people rejected it and jokingly deemed it to be a miracle only if you liked it. But they have done a lot of much better work since. Do not forget that the Southeast Asian graduates of Los Baños are now the agriculturists guiding rice production in Thailand, Vietnam and other places in the region.

A lot of thanks to Danjou for his enlightening post. That about answered my original question.

I shall refrain from commenting on balut other than to mention that I was rather fond of it as a very young child. A propos the seafood though, not an hour from Subic, in Orani, Bataan, there is a round-the-clock seafood market that likely supplied the crab(s) and the scallops in your pictures. And the almost unbearable heat makes me wonder how the sellers keep their highly perishable merchandise from going high in a hurry.

A whole set of ancient Roman sauces such as garum and salsamentum leap from a great distance of time and space to Southeast Asian salty fish sauces such as bagoong and patis (Filipino) and blachan (Indo-Malay) and nuoc mam (Vietnam and Thailand). If borrowing is via cultural or political influence, the cuisines of the entire Southeast Asia is a classic example. Where else can you find in one area the conmingled influence of India, Arabia, Portugal, China, Spain and Mexico. Perhaps, only in present day Canada and USA.

South Beach Diet, oy. Filipino food and dieting seem to be unreconcilable but can be done. The problem is most of our dishes simply cry out to heaven for rice and frankly, a lot of them do not make sense without rice. Take for example, tuyo, daing and delicious dilis. And then you also have to scale the cultural hurdle of eating the dishes unaccompanied with rice, the dreaded papak thats is saddled with opprobrium. But when I considered the alternative, I opted to shed. I have lost 25 pounds now since November.

The lounge at the Ontario Art Galery is a good rest-stop when surveying the collection but since OAG is in the Toronto original Chinatown we usually plan for a substancial dinner elsewhere in the neighborhood. The Royal Ontario Museum on the other hand, houses the restaurant of a local celebrity chef James Kennedy. This is worth a detour in your itinerary. The cafeteria in the Louvre cannot conceivably be made worse while the old one in the NY Metropolitan, the one you enter through the Roman collection was not bad except for the wait staff who were very emphatic in telling you that the tab does not include gratuities. They deal with a lot of foreign tourists, just add the damn gratuities in the bill.

For the last thirty years MOMA in NY always carried one or two of impecable design and manufacture. Now that they have become more easily obtainable, they stopped selling them. Takashimaya always has a few well chosen ones, but they are very expensive. Take a look at the pics on this links: http://www.kougei.or.jp/english/crafts/0801/f0801.html http://www.kougei.or.jp/english/crafts/0802/f0802.html http://www.kougei.or.jp/english/crafts/0804/f0804.html

You mean like this? (Wait for the pic) http://www001.upp.so-net.ne.jp/e-pan/recipe/reccipe.htm

Ah a Chinese dish with a Spanish name. Asado. This is also what they use as filling for our version of char jiu bao down to the quartered hard boiled eggs.

If you are kind of hesitant to tell people that you use hotdog, you can tell them you used viena sausage or frankfurters. They may look askance at these animal by-products but its predominant allspice flavour is an essential ingredient in most of our meat specialties such as Embutido, Morcon, Menudo and Pollo Relleno. In addition to our normal Menudo, we also have a variation than contains a high proportion of diced beef liver. We call it Hígado.

So they are indeed synonyms in Malaysian then. You see I am trying to challenge in my modest way visitors and posters to this thread to be more informed about our own cuisines because Western regard of it can sometimes result in absurd generalisations. Like the previously mentioned term “curry” that summarily encapsulated the vast diversity of Indian regional cuisines in a catch-all term that is hardly ever accurate nor appreciative of its subtleties. Same with the terms soup and viand that superimposed a terminology and concept that’s foreign to a rice-eating culture. To this culture all the dishes in a meal is viewed for its role in relation to the rice. We even have a verb for when you eat unaccompanied by rice a dish that is normally eaten with rice. As you can expect, the word carries with it a tone of mild disapproval. In connection with PPPans’ calamansi, I believe it was Gray Kunz who introduced the use of calamansi to mainstream New York cuisine. He got his idea from a cooking stint in Hong Kong. I said mainstream NY because the Filipino karihan(s) below Port Authority have been using it long before that. In addition to calamansi and dayap, cooks in my town also use a wild and cheap (because its free) souring agent called kabuyaw. Green, the size of a small orange, thick rind and otherwise inedible but the juice offers a unique and exotic citrus flavour.

Thanks for the dictionary links Pan. I looked up gulai and it came up with curry. Now everyone with more than a passing interest in cooking should know that curry means one thing in the West and something else within India and its neighbors, including Thailand and the rest of Southeast Asia. In English, curry is applied to the dish flavoured with a combination of spices called masala in most of the Indian languages. In these languages and in that of the Philippines, Indonesia and probably, Malaysia kari (or kare) is a dish that is close to a Western stew or braise. Whereas gulay (or gule in PPPan’s Kapampangan) is a melange of vegetables that a self-respecting cook would be wise to take pains not to allow to stew. Nowadays, Filipinos call all vegetables gulay but to us older folks (or sticklers for correct usage), gulay is the dish, not the vegetables themselves. The vegetables are gugulayin, literally, the main ingredients that go into a gulay dish. To Stef, Yes I feel your pain. Did you notice too their plantain, did you ever imagine in your life substituting it for our saba? Btw, I told the Jamaican guy that lakatan is our priced indigenous banana variety.

The Malaysian language probably adopted the English word for soup just as most Filipino languages adopted sopas from Spanish but only for a particular kind of soup. If you look hard enough you will, in all likelyhood, find an indigenous Malaysian word for the generic idea of soup. The manner of serving soup alone and separate at the start of the meal is alien to typical Southeast Asian meals. Instead, the liquid in which the main meal of vegetables and/or fish and meat has been cooked serves as our soup and is eaten along with the rest of the meal. This generic liquid is called sabaw in Filipino. A clear example is the Thai Tom Yoong Gung which they serve here (in America) as a soup although in Thailand it is actually a one-bowl accompaniment to rice that happen to have prawns, and vegetable in it. Even the Vietnamese Pho might just be a bowl of soup to you but to a Vietnamese it is a complete meal. The general language group of Malaysia, Indonesia and Filipino have many words in common at first glance but they have actually grown quite apart now due to separate development that these words are now just cognates and most of the time, just false cognates at that. Look at ubi, the Malaysian generic name for tubers. In Filipino ubi has come to apply only to one particular tuber, the purple yam from which our word for the colour purple was also derived.

Exactly my suspicion. Remember they are called "Health and Safety" inspectors?

Rimas reminds me of kamanse. Apparently when Captain Blight (remember the Mutiny on the Bounty?) gathered his breadfruit buddings for Jamaica, only the seedless variety was successfully transported. So I surmise from what my Jamaican acquaintance of long standing says. T’is a pity then that they never heard of seeded breadfruit back there. The more pity too that they have’nt learned to candy breadfruit either. By the way, he is a classic anti-example of what I observed in an old post, that Filipinos are not a chauvinistic bunch. I worked with this guy for sixteen years and tried as he did, he never succeeded in persuading me to go and visit his country. Why would I? His favorite refrain was, oh man if you only know how good our mangoes taste back there. I had to be diplomatic of course because I do know. Their mangoes are so full of husk eating them was like flossing your teeth. Of course it did not make it easy to have a Thai friend who confessed one day that you can find the best tropical fruits only in Thailand with a proviso “but I step aside for the Manila mangoes.” Or Mexican friends who rave and marvel at “mangos de Manila.” Another day the Jamaican fellow bragged to me “and man if you ever taste our banana you would’nt want to leave either.” So finally I asked what kind they grow. Countless varieties, he said, but the best is called “lakatan.” I rest my case.

How did they cook the turbot Markk? And how was it?

Probably yes because soaking kundol or rimas in apog before cooking them in syrup also involves the alkali in apog which is lime (calcium cabonate, I believe). The method though is to make kundol and rimas chunks firm up and not disintegrate. The photo of the Manila men is really interesting. I pick up vintage photos or prints of anything with Filipino connection like that wherever I may find them.

Piazzola, that’s a point of age-old bitter contention among American regional barbecue enthusiasts. But on a different topic, I am not sure if this is a new thing in Buenos Aires, but I was there this April and ordered their Argentinian Jamon Serrano that tasted as good as, if not better, than the real thing from Spain. Lots of Latin American food shows going on day and night in the food channel. I am going back this coming spring also to visit Cordoba and stay long in Mendoza. I’ll probably take a peek at Santiago, Chile too.

Adam, marvellous pics, you are only second to Jacques Cousteau in my book. Any close encounter with turbot?

So, what apple varieties did you end up using? Did you take pics when you sliced it? Would you bake the recipe again as is or you would adjust a few things? Inquiring minds want to know.

The corn you used failed to bind. Try adding a suspension of mochico in water. To alkalyze might be the word you are looking for.

Ah my dear PPPan, you have stumbled upon something on which the new world depended and which, much much later, indisputably demarcated the south from the north better than any Mason-Dixon line could. I’ll try explaining. It was easy enough for the Spaniards to bring us corn from America, after all, they ruled us for the most part through the Viceroy of Mexico where for more than a thousand years maize was the principal sustenance of the entire hemisphere. They must have brought us the cooking process too since our preparation of binatog is so cunningly similar to that of hominy or posole (in Mexico), from the husking down to the boiling in wood ash. The matching with grated coconut is strictly ours. Now, hominy is eaten here (North, Central and South America) both whole (big hominy) or milled and cracked into different degrees of finess (small hominy). Both are eaten as accompaniment to anything and everything. The finer small hominy though is what is called “grits,” the quintessencial southern breakfast. But nothing beats binatog in my book.