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Autumn 2023, Food and Drink, Knowledge Transmission, Modern, Posts

Transpacific Kitchens: The Makings of the Diasporic Kusinera

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By GJ Sevillano

“Through my family’s many moves to many different cities, I began to connect the dots of my life. Every single dot I connected was a pot…that form[s] a picture of my life, my family, my calling, and my home.”

-Malou Perez-Nievera, Connecting the Pots: Charting Stories and Filipino Recipes to Find Home

“This peek into the cooking pots and lifestyle of some families makes one realize how much culinary wealth hides, grows, and brings pleasure in Philippine homes, where in truth our mother cuisine develops.” 

-Doreen G. Fernandez, “Mother Cuisine” in Tikim: Essays on Philippine Food and Culture

 

While elusive, the embodied culinary performances of self-actualization—the private moments and movements in which the cook slices, stirs, and spices her meals to her satisfaction—are palimpsestically constructed in recipes. Recipes serve as a key genre in which historical subjects have constructed versions and visions of themselves that have exceeded the bounds of normative archives and their print cultures—the “undigested” figures that symbolize everyday forms of cultural resilience.[i] Thus, it is important as we expand our understanding of recipes beyond a mere set of culinary instructions, we must also expand our understanding of the figures that “dance” alongside us as we cook through the culinary repertoires of past, present, and future.[ii]

A selection of female-authored Filipino and Filipino American cookbooks. Photo taken by author.

 

 In the opening narrative to her co-authored cookbook with Ligaya Mishan titled Filipinx: Heritage Recipes from the Diaspora, Angela Dimayuga states that writing recipes and creating the cookbook was a “form of coming home.”[iii] Rather than a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age narrative, Filipinx perhaps can be more accurately called a coming-of-home narrative. Home not only in the sense of where she resides, but a coming-of-home within the Filipino diaspora in northern California, within the kitchen, within herself. This literary device, of grappling with different senses of home and homeland, is a key genre used by diasporic Asian writers. From the refugee narrative to the transnational adoptee narrative, Asian migrants have dealt with issues of home in their writing for some time. Similarly, Dimayuga uses the cookbook as a literary site to showcase herself “as a complete person.”[iv] For Dimayuga, her recipes inform not only the foodways she inhabits, but also the person she has found home in—a diasporic kusinera (chef).

The figure of the diasporic kusinera represents the ideals of the modern Philippine kitchen. Caught in the double binds of Spanish and American postcolonialism; cultural preservation and culinary innovation; belonging and unbelonging; and subjecthood and abjecthood, the diasporic kusinera represents the complexities in which Filipina womanhood is constructed in and beyond the sites of the culinary. Recipes like Vanessa Lorenzo’s “Navy Beans with Chorizo and Tomato Chutney (Habichuelas),” Nicole Ponseca’s “Banana Ketchup Ribs,” and Abi Balingit’s “Adobo Chocolate Chip Cookies” index the culinary creativity of the diasporic kusinera that takes seriously the everyday realities of postcolonial life.[v]

As Denise Cruz argues, “Figures of transpacific Filipinas are still a means of negotiating shifts produced by geopolitical transitions, now manifested not in formal empire of occupation, but in the dynamics of neocolonialism and the global marketplace.”[vi] Important to expanding Philippines’ foodways are cookbooks that recenter minoritized experiences of the culinary realm.[vii] Leland Tabares notes how “misfit professionals” use the narrative device of “coming-to-career narratives” to underscore the ways in which chefs of color, female chefs, and queer chefs utilize the genre of the cookbook to challenge normative notions of culinary professionalism.[viii] Building from this, I argue that the cooking, feeding, and eating Filipina embodied in these cookbooks and recipes materializes the ontoepistemological tensions of the quotidian Philippine diaspora. In other words, Philippine tastemakers must grapple with the afterlives and aftertastes of colonial histories that continue to stricture contemporary diasporic life.

In her genre bending cookbook-cum-autobiography-cum-poetry-collection titled Asian Girl in a Southern World: This is Not Your Mother’s Cookbook, Dalena H. Benavente, narrates the struggles of growing up Filipina in Obion County, Tennessee, one of the least Asian-populated places in the U.S. Benavente states, “It’s not enough to tell the stories. You can’t just read about it, hear about it or imagine it. You can’t because it’s just too much. In order to truly understand these stories that I have to tell, you have to eat them.”[ix] She continues, “I hope my noodles make you laugh, my cake makes you want to hug someone you love, and I hope my sangria makes you want to fight for what you believe in.”[x] For Benavente, the normative literary form of narrative is incomplete without taste. To translate her experience as a diasporic kusinera is incomplete without her recipes and her readers cooking alongside her. The consumption of her autobiography can only be corroborated by the embodied experience of following her recipes, cooking her food, and eating the flavors of her transpacific kitchen.

Benavente ends her cookbook where a lot of other Philippine and Filipino-American cookbooks begin, with a recipe for kinilaw, or as she names her dish, a ceviche of jalapeno peppers, prawn and peach. Kinilaw is a dish “cooked” with acid thought to be one of the longest standing pre-colonization culinary traditions native to the Philippines. Benavente’s version differs slightly in her preference to pre-cook the shrimp before she adds it to the lime juice, onion, jalapeno, and peaches. The blend of these seemingly unrelated surf and turf ingredients formulates the essence of her Filipina-American subjecthood. She states, “It’s the marriage of the prawn and peaches together in one place, much like your feet standing on unfamiliar ground but knowing that there is something about the proximity that seems so right.”[xi]

To cook the recipes and eat the foods of transpacific Philippine kitchens means to directly engage with the kusineras that grapple with the complexities of diasporic life. To taste her cuisine one must simultaneously confront the material realities of postcolonial haunting, global capitalism, and everyday cultural resilience.

 

Notes

[i] Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century (New York: New York University Press, 2012).

[ii] Robin Bernstein, “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race,” Social Text, Vol. 27, No. 4 (2009): 67-94.

[iii] Angela Dimayuga and Ligaya Mishan, Filipinx: Heritage Recipes from the Diaspora (New York: Abrams, 2021), 10).

[iv] Ibid.

[v] For recipes see: Jacqueline Chio-Lauri, ed., The New Filipino Kitchen: Stories and Recipes from around the Globe (Chicago: Surrey Books, 2018), 122-129; Nicole Ponseca and Miguel Trinidad, I Am Filipino: And This is How We Cook (New York: Artisan, 2018), 316-319; Abi Balingit, Mayumu: Filipino American Desserts Remixed (New York: Harvest An Imprint of William Morrow, 2023), 143-145.

[vi] Denise Cruz, Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 234.

[vii] Francheska Go, “The Next Generation of Filipino Food,” Food Philippines, https://foodphilippines.com/story/the-next-generation-of-filipino-food/#:~:text=Making%20waves%20in%20the%20global,dishes%20like%20adobo%20and%20sinigang.

[viii] Leland Tabares, “Misfit Professionals: Asian American Chefs and Restaurateurs in the Twenty-First Century,” Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 77, No. 2 (Summer 2021): 103-132.

[ix] Dalena H. Benavente, Asian Girl in a Southern World: This is Not Your Mother’s Cookbook (Self-Pub., Dalena H. Benavente, 2016), Introduction.

[x] Ibid.

[xi] Ibid., 232-233.

 

GJ Sevillano (he/him) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of American Studies at George Washington University. He received his M.A. in American Studies from George Washington University in 2021 and A.B. in Politics and Certificate in American Studies from Princeton University in 2019. He was born and raised in Historic Filipinotown, Los Angeles, CA where his academic curiosity and passion for Filipinx food was cultivated. His writing has been published in Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Ampersand: An American Studies Journal, and Alon: Journal for Filipinx American and Diasporic Studies.

Food and Drink, Global Exchange, Ingredients, Knowledge Transmission, Modern, Series: Politics and Propaganda, Series: Translation

Fairgoing Filipino Food in the Fifties

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By R. Alexander Orquiza

In 1950, the cooking demonstrations at the California State Fair were a way to taste and see the globe. Americans were eager to show their newfound cosmopolitan tastes. World War II had ended. Many Americans firmly believed in Henry Luce’s “American Century.” But what do those food demonstrations in a Sacramento fairground say about the consumers who eagerly ate these foods?

California State Fair Agriculture Building, 1950. Image Credit: Sacramento Public Library, Sacramento Room.

A close examination of the Filipino recipes from California Cookery (1950), the official cookbook of the state fair, provides an interesting case. One can easily see an emerging American consumerism, the heavy hand of culinary adaptation, and a bit of historical amnesia in the presentation of Filipino food.

Coolerator Fridges, 1953. Image Credit: RetroLicious Ltd., Pinterest, https://www.pinterest.co.uk/retroliciousltd/

On a larger scale, these demonstrations promoted different international cuisines as a way of advertising the new appliances of the post-war American consumer society. In addition to Filipino cuisine, there were demonstrations of recipes from Norway, the Netherland, China, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Germany and Mexico thanks to “the cooperation of the consulates of several nations.” The Pioneer Appliance Company of San Francisco provided its “Coolerator” line of refrigerators, electric stoves, and freezers; the demonstration kitchens were lined with Armstrong Linoleum floors; and United Grocer of Sacramento stocked the shelves with imported goods and fresh California produce. Demonstrations thus simultaneously broadened the culinary mindset of attendees while directing consumers to buy the latest kitchen gear at their local store.

The recipes clearly catered to an American audience that was unfamiliar with Filipino food even after fifty-two years of American presence in the Philippines. Recipes used easy-to-find ingredients and presented a familiar three-course structure to entice Americans suspicious of trying Filipino food.

Demonstrators offered five recipes. Adobong Baboy (braised pork) was described in the official California State Fair cookbook as “the national dish of the Philippines” that was conveniently served either hot or cold. Its listed ingredients—pork, garlic pepper, salt, lemon, and water—were easy to find. They paired Adobong Baboy with ensaladang kamatis (tomato salad), a similarly easy-to-prepare dish of sliced tomatoes sprinkled with salt. Served alongside white rice (kanin) and completed with one ripe banana (pang matamis) per person, the demonstration presented a clear message—anyone could make Filipino food.

However, a closer look at these dishes shows complexity beyond the simple consumer nirvana  of the fairgoers. The recipe for adobong baboy failed to use the essential ingredient of a Filipino adobo—vinegar, the ingredient that quickly pickles and preserves pork in the tropics—one of the reasons why the adobo cooking method became popular in the Philippines.

Chicken adobo. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Moreover, the recipe failed to describe the multiple variations of adobo. Each region, each island (and there are over 7,000 islands in the Philippines) has its own adobo that differs according to vinegar, spices (bay leaves, annatto seeds, cloves, or turmeric), and the use of sugar or coconut milk. Similarly, ensaladang kamatis removed key ingredients— coconut vinegar, shrimp paste red onions, ginger, and pepper—that give a Filipino tomato salad its bite. Perhaps it was difficult to find coconut vinegar and shrimp paste in 1950s Sacramento; but the remaining ingredients were surely available. White rice, or kanin, was (and is) undoubtedly a staple of Filipino cooking; but Filipinos commonly line their rice pots with banana leaves to impart characteristic flavor. Finally, while a ripe banana is a great way to end a Filipino meal, the sliced fruit that most Filipinos end a meal with is mango.

One imagines that United Grocer had a hard time procuring mangoes, banana leaves, shrimp paste, and coconut vinegar in the 1950s. But these culinary adaptations are also indicative of how little Americans knew about the Philippines despite five decades of American colonial rule. The state fair demonstrations were more California than Philippines as recipes lacked indigenous ingredients and descriptions of their rich culinary historical backstories of trans-Pacific exchange and Hispanicization. “Exotic” Filipino food joined the other international cuisines that inspired the emerging American middle class to invest in new kitchen appliances. Yet those other countries did not have the same colonial relationship with the United States dating back to the Spanish-American War in 1898.

Now that Filipino cuisine is the latest Southeast Asian food fad in the United States, it is easy to forget that introducing Americans to Filipino food at the California State Fair in 1950 inevitable meant compromises on ingredients, techniques, and dishes. Recreating Manila in Sacramento before the age of jet travel was always going to be a stretch. But the removal of the social and cultural histories behind dishes, particularly their connections to western imperialism, reflected a larger ignorance and amnesia to American empire in the Philippines. A deeper dive into Filipino food would inevitable reveal the dirtier, bloodier aspects of the American relationship with the Philippines. Filipino food, removed of its historical context, became yet another way to promote the new ethos of the post-war American consumer.