Asian Journal- The Filipino-American Community Newspaper

So here I am, racing the sunrise through the South Luzon Expressway straight from an all-nighter at work, rushing to make it to the 5:45 am Makati pick-up. I haven’t really seen the sunrise since God knows when and my body is just about ready to melt into anything that remotely resembles a bed. But I stifle a yawn, put on my sunglasses, and energize myself with one powerful thought: a breakfast of tasty, juicy, sweet tocino. I am, after all, headed for Pampanga. On a culinary tour, at that.

The email invitation Tracey Santiago of Alquimista Trails sent the day before was straightforward enough. It detailed the itinerary for her Viajeng Cusinang Matua, but it also read like a menu. I scanned the page; read Mexico, Sta. Rita and San Fernando jumbled with words like tocino, sisig and halo-halo; made a mental note to skip dinner; and signed up at the last minute.

I make the Makati pick-up just in time and with enough self-control to forego a fast food pre-breakfast bite. An hour and a Quezon City pick-up later, we are traversing the North Luzon Expressway in a red rented van. There are 15 of us, including Tracey and the driver, and there is small talk about whether anybody has already had a bite to eat. In anticipation of the day ahead, most of us have only had coffee.

"Nobody is going to go home hungry," Tracey promises us, "In fact, the challenge is to be able to accommodate everything that’s going to be prepared for us today."

With us are four lady friends in their 50s. They are foodies, they say, and, like many of us, their interest was piqued by Tracey’s itinerary-slash-menu email invitation. They are looking forward to the frog and crickets, I’m all about the tocino and sisig, and we’re all hoping to be digesting something more than food at the end of the day.

There is an auspicious occurrence: after a bathroom break at a gas station in Mexico, Pampanga, one of the ladies bump into an old friend from elementary school. They barely recognize each other, so they have to give out their complete maiden names. The old friend used to work for the United Nations and was based in New York for 25 years. She is retired now and has moved back to the country to rediscover her roots. In fact, she is also on a road trip with her husband.

We have an 8am breakfast in the courtyard of Lillian Borromeo’s ancestral home in Mexico. Tracey tells us that Borromeo, who is a cooking show host, is a recognized expert of traditional Kapampangan cuisine and also a respected food historian. Over breakfast and during the tour of her old kitchen afterwards, I find out that she is also an engaging storyteller and a doting grandmother. There is a warmth about her that almost makes you wish she were your—and, of course, that you could wake up to her comfort cooking every single day. She serves us a mouth-watering buffet of sinangag, dinuguan, puto, kutsinta, galantina and her very own homemade tocino capped with a mug of native tsokolate. I watch, entranced, as her helper whisks the tsokolate in an old copper pitcher into a frothy consistency with a wooden batirol.

While we eat, Borromeo tells us her family history (some of the branches of which are represented in different bilaos); of a friendly, handsome ghost of a man who sometimes appears along the stairs of her old house; and the history of her family’s famous San Nicolas cookies.

I tell one of my tour companions that I’ve never tried San Nicolas cookies before, and he tells me they’re like uraro, which, to me, is like a cross between a butter cookie and polvoron. Borromeo tells us of how the cookies were introduced by the Spanish friars around 1600 making them, perhaps, the oldest cookies in the country and she gives us the ingredients: eggs, arrowroot flour, cornstarch, sugar, oil, coconut milk and lime. She demonstrates how the cookies are made and gives us a chance to mold some leaf-shaped cookies ourselves, for this is what makes her San Nicolas cookies special: she still uses hand-carved wooden molds dating back to the 18th century and no two molds are alike.

We have such a wonderful time chatting with Borromeo that we arrive a bit late at the Alviz Farm in Sta. Rita. "Late" is at around 10am, which is still early in my book, but not in these parts. It is planting season, and there was an early morning feast, complete with music, for anybody who came to plant the first stalks of rice, and we have missed it. There are still some farmers working in the field, and some of our companions decide to give planting rice a try. They are given straw hats and advised to roll up their jeans. They come back a quarter of an hour later, bearing the happy conclusion that planting rice, indeed, is never fun. "You learn to value each grain of rice," one of them tells me.

Our host, farm owner, artist and passionate Kapampangan culture promoter Andy Alviz offers us a morning merienda of tamales wrapped in banana leaves, pan de sal, and refreshing pandan iced tea. We eat inside an open hut, away from the heat of the sun, but in the cool embrace of the breeze. It is my first time to try tamales, and I bite into it expecting a sweet rice cake, so I am surprised to discover it is salty and topped with meat. It is flavorful, melts in the mouth, and heavy on the belly.

The tamales, I surmise, is yet another link we have to Spain-via-Mexico. In Mexico the country this time, and not the Pampanga town, they have their own tamales, which are made of corn dough, have a sweet or savory filling, and are usually wrapped in cornhusks. I suspect the Kapampangan tamales is a product of a substitution of ingredients and the Filipino tendency to make something foreign uniquely our own: from corn dough to rice flour, corn husks to banana leaves.

Alviz, who has worked as a choreographer on musicals like Urinetown and Miss Saigon, tells us that he is first and foremost a farmer and expresses how much good it would do if we all went back to farming. I look at what he has around his cozy hut: it is a scene straight out of an Amorsolo painting and it isn’t even sunset yet. I take a deep, relaxing breath, promise myself a farm when I grow up, and help myself to another serving of pandan iced tea.

Within the farm grounds, there is a rest house, called Bale Nang Juan. It is a simple, sturdy, spacious house made mostly of wood salvaged from old, torn-down houses. Colorful windows and antique accents give it an artistic touch. It stands, both bare and grand, opening itself to its environs, rather than closing down on itself. I see in it Alviz’s passion to make Sta. Rita and, in effect, other such hometowns come to life again in the hearts and imaginations of not just the Kapampangans, but all Filipinos.