Taste of Control by René Alexander D. Orquiza

Author:René Alexander D. Orquiza
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rutgers University Press

The Stories within Recipes

Recipes in these cookbooks revealed a tension in the Philippines either to celebrate the new among Americans or to hold onto the old by Filipinos. Depending on the nationality of their authors, cookbooks presented the full promotion of Western ingredients, or they defended the traditions and native ingredients that many Filipinos still enjoyed.

A survey of the ice cream recipes in these cookbooks reveals that they were largely homogenizing how eaters experienced different Filipino fruits despite claims of celebrating variety. Cookbook recipes removed the textures and appearances of native fruits with instructions to purée and blend them into vanilla ice cream, making them more approachable for Americans new to the Philippines. For example, the Manila Cook Book offered four recipes that largely folded mango and pineapple into standard bases to make mango ice cream, mango sorbet, pineapple ice cream, and pineapple sorbet.49 Good Cooking repeated these same offerings, with a mango ice cream recipe that added diced mangoes to vanilla ice cream and a mango mousse recipe that folded puréed mangoes into powdered sugar and canned whipping cream. It notably expanded its use of native fruits atop scoops of vanilla ice cream with recipes for atis (custard apple), buko (coconut), makapuno (young coconut), pinipig (toasted rice), and ube (purple yam).50 Yet all of these additions were simply different forms of ice cream with diced fruits or a base of vanilla ice cream with folded fruit purées. Everyday Cookery expanded the list of native ingredients incorporated into ice cream to include guayabano (soursop) and melon, yet it reverted to using Western cuisine by calling for imported canned milk.51 Regardless of the publication, ice cream recipes made tropical fruits edible by altering their original appearances and textures to homogenize them into additions to simple vanilla creams and custards.

Cookbook recipes for jams and jellies similarly combined purées of native fruits with sugar and gelatin to create sweet tastes and silky textures. By pairing these condiments with their recipes for baked goods, cookbooks further transformed raw native ingredients into items that celebrated Western culinary techniques. The Manila Cook Book offered jam and jelly recipes for the mango and pineapple, but it also included fruits that did not appear in the ice cream chapter, such as kamias (pineapple tree), duhat (Java plum), guava, suha (pomelo), and tamarind.52 Good Cooking expanded the use of jams and jellies with twenty-one different condiment recipes that included apple, beet, chico, chili, duhat, green pepper, guava, rhubarb, and santol. It supplemented these condiments with pickle recipes for kamias, limes, pineapple, watermelon rind, and mangoes.53 Even Everyday Cookery featured a section on jams and jellies that showed the importance that these recipes now played in a cooking culture that placed outsized importance on baked goods. These condiments offered an even safer and more valued path to Filipino acceptance than ice cream as an accompaniment for the breads, muffins, and sandwiches that increasingly penetrated Filipino home kitchens.

When American-authored cookbooks used the term “Filipino,” their recipes showed little connection or engagement with Filipino cuisine.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.