The Best of Philippine Cuisine

From the Chinese we have the whole noodle business: pancit miki, pancit bihon, pancit Canton, pancit sotanghon. But the Filipinos have completely imbued the dishes with their own flair, and now there is a different kind of pancit for almost every region on the Philippines. Other Chinese-inspired dishes, such as lumpia, kikiam, siopao, and siomai, have been absorbed into the Filipino way of life. They are part of Filipino diet, even today.

Three hundred years of preparing dinner for Mother Spain gave us a flair for rich food, the way Europeans prepare it. Stews such as the cocido and puchero, rice-meat dishes and elaborate desserts such as brazos, and tortas imperiales are generally considered fiesta food, and most often found on the dining tables of the upper classes.

Here's an interesting history. The rich leche flan, that most wonderful dessert made of egg yolk was a byproduct of churches. In those days when Spanish friars had to build massive churches to awe the natives, cement was still a dream. The ingenious frailes used bricks made of ground limestone, sea-shells, straw and egg white.

Eggs were abundant in the islands, since the indios raised chickens in their backyards and regularly donated fowl and egg to the church. Hating to waste the yolk, the Filipinos added milk and concocted the leche flan.

Sure, they brought us kitchen conveniences like the refrigerator, the pressure cooker, the oven toaster and the microwave. They also gave us burgers, salads, and pies which we baked with native fruits. But though we absorbed so much of their culture in their 50-year colonization, American cooking is only now becoming part of Philippine cuisine.

Through their fastfood joints, we indirectly tasted spaghetti and pizza. But somehow we wanted these to taste sweet, not sour as the Italians intended them to be.