I am glad to share this posting with you from the Philippine Embassy in Russia. It's about Filipino Food-a topic I love to write and read. The above photo is shrimp Sinigang, one of my favorite Pinoy Dishes. The word TIKIM, meaning is to Taste!
"APRIL is also Filipino Food Month, and so Philippine Embassy in Russia remembers Professor Doreen Gamboa-Fernandez (1934-2002). The Silay, Negros Occidental native pioneered food writing in the Philippines, making sense of the sheer variety and diversity of flavors of Filipino cuisine which she admitted was very difficult to describe, and thus helped put Filipino cuisine on the global map today.
In her groundbreaking 1975 essay “Why Sinigang?”, she caused an uproar by suggesting that sinigang rather than adobo, which has Mexican origins, is the representative Filipino dish: “Rather than the overworked adobo (so often identified as Philippine stew in foreign cookbooks), sinigang seems to me the most representative of Filipino taste ... We like the lightly boiled, slightly soured, the dish that includes fish (or shrimp, or meat), vegetables and broth. It is adaptable to all tastes, to all classes and budgets, to seasons and availability.”
According to Hope Ngo, Fernandez traveled all over the archipelago, reaching out to farmers and fishermen, prominent chefs and waiters, to roadside market vendors and their customers, all in an effort to understand why we Filipinos eat what we eat. In the end, she was able to present Filipino food at once local and universal — as "a Malay matrix, in which melded influences from China and India, Arabia, Spain and America”.
As historian Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett points out in “Gastronomica”, Fernandez used words to paint a culinary landscape that Filipinos could relate to, understand, and be proud to call their own.
Found in many Ilonggo households and karinderyas, kansi proves that Filipino food is endlessly inventive — borrowing, blending, and bold with flavor.
