Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/125316
From my perspective, the bigger hurdle seems to be that the Philippines are never invited to the world table. The country has a deep culinary tradition, including a compelling menu of vinegar-soaked meats called adobo, sour soups brimming with seafood and roast suckling pig. Yet its cuisine is virtually unknown outside the islands. And it's not just the food. Most Westerners' grasp of the country ends at Imelda Marcos and her shoes. Yet the Philippines, consisting of more than 7,000 islands, has much to offer: unruly mountainscapes, empty beaches, a blend of Spanish and indigenous cultures and a tradition of hospitality. If the place is such a sumptuous feast, why do so few visitors show up? F ilipino cuisine is tough to pin down. But there are a few staples: rice, fish and coconuts, which grow almost everywhere and are the source of milk, food, oil and even fuel for cooking. It's also safe to say that Filipinos like their food tart (vinegar and fruits are used widely as souring agents) and pungent (the potent fermented shrimp paste, bagoong, adds a distinctive flavour). Beyond that, the typical Filipino table can hold Chinese-style noodles, Spanish sausage, Mexican-inspired meat pies and dozens of other foreign-derived delicacies. The essence of the cuisine – and culture – is variety. Brought together in 1565 under the banner of Spain's then king, Philipp II, the Philippines became a trade outpost between East and West. Galleons carried gold, spices, porcelain and raw commodities, such as copra (dried coconut meat) from Manila to the crown by way of the Spanish viceroy of Mexico. They also brought delicacies such as chocolate and chilies across the Pacific. Next came the Americans, who settled in between 1897 and the Second World War and stamped the country with their own traditions, including canned meat (a holdover from military rations) and fast food. I've chosen to confine my travels to Luzon. At just over 100,000 square kilometres, the northern island is the largest in the Philippines and home to perhaps the broadest range of cooking styles, from Manila's hothouse food scene to a handful of renowned culinary traditions beyond. This morning I'm heading northwest, out of Manila, where skyscrapers give way to prim, leafy neighbourhoods, then dingy shantytowns, and eventually grassy lowlands sown with rice. I'm bound for Pampanga, a iStock (pork) p28-33_Phillipines.indd 31 p rovince two hours away that is revered for its culinary heritage. It's also the home of Claude Tayag, a cherubic celebrity chef known as the face of Pampangan cuisine. He welcomes me at his doorstep with the traditional local greeting, Mengan naka? (Have you eaten?) Quick to downplay his culinary qualifications – "Everything I learned about cooking is from my mother" – Tayag insists he is more carpenter, architect and artist than chef. He shows me his home, a sweeping stilted creation he pieced together from reclaimed lumber. In one corner, he's built a traditional open-air kitchen, complete with a wood-fired oven and stone-top stove. Hundreds of iron and hardwood cooking implements, cracked and blackened from time, hang above a counter. Tayag lays out a huge spread, explaining that Pampangan is a cuisine of extravagance. "Historically, Pampangos had first access to the imported foods transported through here," Tayag says, noting that the region is located at the end of the principal inland river from the South China Sea. "That changed the way we cook. So when a recipe calls for one tablespoon of butter, in Pampanga, you put two." The meal starts with crackling, flash-fried catfish and dollops of fermented shrimp paste bundled into fresh mustard leaves, a Pampangan rendition of lettuce wraps. Then Tayag serves kare kare, a hearty peanut-laced stew with oxtail, which looks like some alien sea creature floating in red-brown sauce. It crunches like fresh celery at first, but then melts away as I chew. If the rear-end of a water buffalo can taste this good, my trip promises to be memorable. V enturing around the Luzon countryside in search of Filipino delicacies sounds like a brilliant plan – until you find yourself staring down a chef's special of sautéed beetles or a steaming bowl of pig innards, as I do in Tuguegarao. After Tayag's, I fly north to explore the muscular mountains of the Cordillera highlands. Famous for the thousand-year-old rice terraces at Banaue and isolated tribes who still nurse ritual animosity, this unforgiving land is to Manila what the Australian outback is to Sydney. "The food in the north is honest, poverty cuisine," a food photographer from Manila told me a few days earlier. The comment confused me, but not for long. At my first meal in Tuguegarao, I'm served a stew of beef liver, intestines and earlobes, followed by dinuguan – pig's blood soup. Then comes papaitan, which I later learn takes its batteryacid bitterness from cow's bile. I turn my attention to the bracing, but easier to digest, sights. Rice terraces cascade down peaks so steep they would have given the Incas pause. Just as impressive are the roads that needle through the range, which are buried under avalanches of mud almost nightly as the violent rains of the monsoon draw near. Locals negotiate these trails in jeepneys, a cross between a jeep, a bus and a hearse. Technicolor and heavily chromed, each is one-of-a-kind and splashed with a worrisome name (Iron Maiden) and slogan (God Save Us). I book one for the 24-km round trip from Banaue to Hapao. When the clouds let loose en route, our driver overcorrects through a turn and slides into an embankment, where we wait for two hours through biblical rain until a front-end loader arrives to dig us out. Sitting on that mountain track, I have time to reflect. Not only will these hills support little agriculture, but simply getting food from place to place is a hardship. So people eat what they can get and make the best of it. That explains all the innards, secretions and parts: nothing remotely nourishing goes to waste. J utting southeast from the main mass of Luzon like an octopus's tentacles, the Bicol Peninsula is a raw and fertile lowland of rice paddies and coconut palms pocked by a rash of volcanoes. After a week of austerity eating in the Cordillera, the chilies and creamy coconuts that enliven Bicolano cuisine make mealtime feel like an indulgence. From Naga, the Bicol region's provincial capital, I head south for Buhi, a vertiginous town crouching between volcanoes on the banks of an 18-square-km lake. I tour the waterfront with Salvador Espiritu, a bony little man who describes the lake's diminutive fish, sinarapan. They grow no bigger GOING PL ACES >> s u m m e r 2 0 1 3 31 13-04-12 1:09 PM