Apicio

A note for non-Canadians, Upper Canada is what became the province of Ontario, the birth-place of MacIntosh apples and the pomologist after whom Macoun apples was named and also of very good cheddar cheese such as Balderson’s and the seven year old one that they sell in the Saint Lawrence market in Toronto.

Mother on the other hand was deeply suspicious of anything that has to do with nuns or priests or even worse, nuns with priests. All of us kind of tiptoed around her for fear of triggering her barrage of spanish invectives let out in fits of disgust and outrage. But this is way off topic. Still very much on topic though is distinctly Filipino desserts. Looks like Brazo de gitano and Brazo de la reyna are just two names for the same rolled sheets of sponge cake filled with custard, whipped cream or jam, a kind of dressy pionono. Its interesting to compare that this rolled shape suggests to the Spanish mind an upper arm while the French see in the same rolled shape a log (bûche). That’s likely why the Mexican cylindrical tamal is also called brazo whereas all the variations of rolled cakes (usually served at Christmas time) in France are all Bûches (de Noël). Now, in both Spain and France, but specially in France, the cake component can be joconde, génoise, biscuit or their chocolate versions but never a sheet of pure meringue as in our Braza Mercedez. The same freedom of choice goes for the filling, it can be whipped cream, butter cream, ganache, crème pâtissière, etc. but hardly ever a spreadable custard paste as in our Braza Mercedez. So I think we may now lay claim to Braza Mercedez too as one of our very own. Yes, Stef, it’s typhoon season di’nt you know. What Filipino site is that?

Sugar on corn you say? Why, you made my mouth water for binatog (actually called pamitak in my hometown and kinulti in most of Nueva Ecija). I tried recreating it when I was living in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies but alas, failed. I used hominy corn that brought a completely alien taste to it. Nothing like our variety of glutinous maize (lagkitan) soaked overnight and simmered in water laced with wood ash for a few more hours until the plasticky hulls come off and the swollen kernels puff into chewy tender morsels. Eaten off banana leaf cones with grated coconut and seasoned with salt and sugar. Great on stormy days when the school announcements dispense you to show up. To PPPan, Yes I saw it that's why it bugs me not to remember any that I have eaten other than the ones that got through when I did not sift my flour.

Same as JayBassin except not as "day-old" but as a "special."

Relax Lesley C, some of us need better olive oil than others.

Not one of the three suggested in the recipe is a pie apple so I guess that’s your license to use any variety that's available (and cheap). But as Russ mentioned, avoid red delicious and I’ll add to that royal gala because its eating out of hand qualities just disappears in cooking. Bagged apples are the cheapest but I notice you’re from Ontario like I am so you’re probably close to a farmer’s stand or market where you can buy them by the basket.

Tugui is shaped like an elongated medium sized potato, circular in cross section (never flat), light brown parchment like skin with fine roots randomly sticking out. Very easy to peel and its texture is also very close to a very starchy variety of potato, not mealy but rather pasty. How about boiled araro. So easy to peel because of the overlapping scale-like cover and so hard to eat because of the husky meat but so delicious because the flavour is so much better than your most expensive asparagus.

Purple yam is probably just a variety of both the Alata and Trifida species of the genus Dioscorea which have generally white tubers. It is known in India as Ratalu, Saint Vincent’s yam in Jamaica and Ubi in the Tagalog region of the Philippines. The colour and the intensity of its flavour actually ranges from very pale lilac to deep reddish purple (magenta). It was a special Christmas festival food where I grew up (Bataan) and each family makes its own batch of jalea with mashed steamed or boiled purple yam, cow’s or coconut milk and sugar. The resulting chewy paste is them distributed among friends, neighbours and relatives. At Christmas morning we use to end up with a huge mound of jalea whose colours straddled the whole violet spectrum. We then blended then into a uniform mauve colour in a huge wok. Buy the frozen chunks instead of the powder or the grated ones because when I opened my shop six years ago, I was thawing a whole box of the grated ones and all of the colour drained with the water. It was fake.

Try locating a Spanish or South American store and chances are they’ll carry Spanish olive oil. The Loblaw’s chain here carried them ten years ago under the Dave Nichol’s President Choice label but stopped when their stock sold out so I started checking out the local latin stores. And I found even better ones such as the Blanqueta Extra Virgin that’s excellent for drizzling and inexpensive too.

Read about Rey Lim, a Philippine born chef heading a modern restaurant in Beijing. This article is from Departures of September 2002. Here is the link: http://www.departures.com/ep/ep_0902_beijing.html

To Markk and Rooftop1000, Rose Levy Beranbaum has a recipe for a tender-flaky crust with creamcheese which I find easier to handle than the normal pie crust recipes because it takes out a lot of the guesswork involved. This is my default pie crust recipe now because I also like its appearance, texture and taste. I have also heard of the version you mentioned but from Garrison Keillor. I never tried it though because I am afraid that the bits of cheese would turn rubbery once cooked and allowed to cool down.

Okay, now that we are all gathered round, in your conversations about food with others who do not have any Filipino connection, what Filipino food or food combination or flavoring really really raised some eyebrows? Do not include the usual suspect, balut. My Mexican friends try hard not to burst with laughter whenever I mention that we eat avocados and corn (as in cream of) as dessert.

If you have both All purpose flour and Cake flour, you can follow Rose Berenbaum’s suggestion of blending (by weight) 2/3 AP flour with 1/3 Cake flour. This is exactly what we do at the shop. I inquired from my supplier about Pastry flour but it was $5 more per 20 kilogram bag whereas AP and Cake flour were priced the same.

There again the ever expanding woodwork of food naming. Dinuguan seems to be the general term and usually includes pork organ meat cooked in vinegar (or tamarind, for special occasions) and flavored with mild green pepper (sileng panigang or pamaksew). There is even a technique to get a homogenized soupy consistency that does not separate. We use no organ meat, just chopped beef chunks for our tinadtad. I asked somebody once what distinguishes tinumis from dinuguan and got an unconvincing answer that tinumis is a lot less soupy and stewyer than dinuguan. I have grown fastidious and squeamish over the years (not to mention the ever present spectre of gout). While some people use crushed morcillas when fresh blood is not available, I simply cook my beef tinadtad now with boiled tamarind extract and banana peppers skipping the bloody business all together. Still good.

Canonigos are actually closer to Oeufs a la neige (Snow eggs) rather than to Ile Flotant (floating island). Ile Flotant being a single large meringue afloat in a soft custard sea while Oeufs a la neige are individual egg-shaped ones that also have been poached in milk. Both served with berries in season and further decorated with a loose nest of caramel threads. Sans Rival (meringue-nut layer cake with butter-cream filling and frosting) is of French derivation although no longer known under that name. Julia Child included it in her original book where it is called variously as Le Succès - Le Progrès - La Dacquoise or even Gâteau Japonais. Since even slight and various variation invite one name or another, I think, we can safely call Sans Rival a legitimate Filipino version particularly if you use our intensely flavoured local cashew nuts and fresh butter (imported from New Zealand or Australia or the tinned ones from Denmark, in the distant olden days).

Braza Mercedez, as my mother insisted is its correct name, definitely belongs to the repertoire of egg and milked based desserts we obviously inherited from Spain. This group includes the caramel custard flan (redundantly called leche flan), egg yolk and milk paste yemas, pure yolk and syrup custard tocino del cielo, candied egg yolk noodles cabellos de angel and a local version of Ile Flotant called canonigos. Most likely originally brought to the colonies by the nuns and taught in convent schools to the daughters of the rich and subsequently filtered down to the general population. In Nora Daza’s most recent recipe collection, she mentions that she served Braza Mercedez in her Filipino restaurant in Paris and no one found it to be a European dessert. Apparently, you can no longer find it in Spain and they have never heard of it either in Mexico and Argentina. The original recipe for the meringue can be improved by gradual addition of a cooked paste made out of two tablespoons of cornstarch and a quarter cup of water. The filling can be made a lot less cloyingly sweet by blending in creme patisier to taste. And PPPan, my thought exactly about the organism. You never know it might be in the soil of Laguna and Quezon because our supposed macapuno tree (in Bataan) never succeeded in producing a real macapuno coconut.

If it is a business to business site, chances are you can get the items for a lot less than what is listed.

I’m posting this here because of its limited interest. Yes you are right PPPan about the sweet and sour aspect of our escabeche. Enriqueta David-Perez included three recipes of escabeche in her cookbook. All three of them bearing undeniable Chinese influence. The first one includes tokwa (firm taufu), the next chunks of green papaya and the last one is actually Fried Fish in Sweet and Sour Sauce renamed Cantonese style Escabeche. We call this last one Escabecheng Macau at home which makes me wonder about the overlapping Iberian influence. Macau of course, being for a long time the Asian out-post of the Portuguese empire. My dad’s family cooked the unadorned escabeche to feed the bearers of our family’s float for the Maundy Thursdays night procession of Holy Week for at least three generations that the float itself came to be identified as the escabeche float.

There are very limited consumer reviews here: http://www.coffeegeek.com/reviews/vacpots/...kandeckerinfuze While you are there maybe you should check out the review of its Bodum equivalent which caused a lot of grief to a friend.

Let us know if you were raised in this tradition and tell us what kind of cheese and where you’re from. I learned this in Toronto and its Northern Spy apple pie and Canadian medium aged cheddar here.

Another desert item that seems to be unique to the Philippines is macapuno. It is sometimes translated into English as coconut sport because that is what it is, a freak of nature. You get it from a normal coconut tree that has a propensity for some of its fruits to be acted on by some organism that thickens the normally firm nutmeat into something chewy and turn its coconut water into a viscuous clear liquid. The flavour is ever so subtly changed too. There is so much thickening of the nutmeat in some of them that it almost fills the hollow space inside, hence macapuno, solid, full. Inspite of the extensive exploitation of the coconut industry in Thailand, I have yet to see a jar of Thai macapuno and is’nt that a big relief for Laguna and Quezon. They have not discovered them either in Jamaica where coconuts also grow in abundance but maybe because theirs is not really a coconut culture. But its absence in Brazil really startles me because their coconut cuisine almost parallels the sophistication of that of South East Asia. But neither Bahian nor the rest of Nordeste cuisine have it either.

To introduce Ligita’s Quick Apple Cake on page 383, he says “Stick a bookmark here, and leave it in.” I did and now my copy opens there. Next page is Hilda’s Apple Cake and then Margaret’s. Skip two pages and it will open to All-Time-Best Summer Fruit Torte. Ligita’s Apple Cake is just one of my all time favourites along with Hilda and Margaret’s apple cake. The Down-East Cranberry Apple Pie on page 500 though is another dessert I cannot live without.

Still on the topic of Filipino desserts - Filipino immigrants who arrived here in the sixties and seventies remember the time when they had to search high and low for cooking bananas (plantain or saba). Only the West Indian stores sold them and what they sold was very expensive and of dubious quality since more often than not they never ripened. So we started experimenting with what was abundant and available and fell upon the common apple as filling for turron. Those who settled in communities bordering the great lakes are even more fortunate because this is the home and birthplace of the cosummate pie apple called Northern Spy. These apples are great for cooking because they do not loose their fall flavour and they hold their shape under fire which you cannot say about the rest that just turn to mush when heated. These days when city limits have sprawled into the countryside most anywhere, one has to drive around only a few minutes to reach a farmer’s produce stand that in the olden days we drove half a day for to reach. Now I would say that turron is just one of the very few desserts with an emphatic and distinct Filipino connection. You wo’nt see them in Chinese or Thai restaurants and even my Indonesian and Vietnamese friends, let alone Central and South American amigos, have ever heard of them until they tasted some in a Filipino home.

This is one cookbook that I am really surprised I have not come accross often enough in any thread in this forum and yet if anyone abandoned me in a dessert island (with a well stocked larder) I would not wished to be rescued immediately if I have this with me along with Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and Craig Clairborne and Virginia Lee’s The Chinese Cookbook. Sax’s cookbook provides me with a never ending supply of dessert ideas that reminds me of my mother who slapped or whipped together something simple for dessert while the rest of our family was eating our meal.

Close to four centuries of common history with Spain brought us escabeche that has gradually been adopted to local taste. Our version (Philippine) is still very close to the Jamaican version in that the fried fish is marinated in vinegar and onions seasoned with garlic and ginger, the last two being Asian condiments commonly used to tame the flavour of fish. But since it is most often eaten with fish sauce, it kind of harkens back to the Apician dish requiring liquamen. Liquamen, of course, being a simple equivalent of our patis (nuoc mam in Vietnamese). The time it is traditionally served too is a long observed Spanish usage, during the Catholic lenten meatless Fridays. It is also a highly desired alternative to bacalao a la vizcaina for the main meal of Good Friday.