Memories — sometimes they light the gastronomic corners of my mind. Like when I met up with my old friend Ophie online, almost two decades after we last saw each other.
All of a sudden I found myself thinking of embutido. Her mom’s, to be exact. I was introduced to this Filipino version of meatloaf back in college, when Ophie took it upon herself to oversee my daily feeding, seeing as how my lunch money went to Red Horse and weed (she used to raise a stink about that). Damn fine meatloaf it was, too, if a bit sneaky (surely you agree), insinuating itself into my subconscious like it did, waiting for the appropriate trigger to finally unsheathe its pale-brown, eggy, raisiny glory to the full light of my cognition. But I can’t complain, considering how many times Tita Midz’s little culinary wonder saved me from certain starvation. (The good that people do may be “oft interred with their bones”, but one apparently lives on in the hippocampal region of my brain — in a soothing memory-image of embutido.)
On the other hand, there’s food I had to be saved from, and the association resulting from that was pretty wretched. I’m talking about milk, the stomach-turning smell of which recalls a period in my childhood when my mother forced us to drink the stuff. I would stare at the impossibly full glass, contemplating a deal with the devil to be spared the torture of having to drink its contents. If Ma (or the maid) as much as blinked, I would pour all of it down the drain, but most of the time I held my breath, downed it as fast as humanly possible, and proceeded to regurgitate the whole mess into the toilet bowl — if I made it that far. I must have tried all the formulas available on the market (with their varying puke scents — Prosobee had the ickiest) before Pa finally put his foot down and ordered a stop to the madness. That bad, you ask? I’d sooner drink battery fluid is what I’m telling you.
Sense and memory, scientists say, are inextricably bound. Milk recalls a minor childhood trauma; sardines in tomato sauce conjures up images of typhoon dinners; Timbura and Bobot evoke scenes of grade-school recess periods — these are all immediate and straightforward enough. Then there’s sense memory: the memory of a smell, a taste, that takes me back in time. Well, that’s no less real, too.
Like when I remember the aroma of freshly brewed coffee made from dry-roasted corn kernels. It’s a smell I haven’t encountered in a long time, and doubt I ever will again. But I remember it vividly, as I do now. And as I do, I am transported back to a hot summer day, watching my maternal grandmother in her rocking chair by the window. She sits by herself, reading Bisaya magazine, head slightly bowed to reveal thinning, Bigen-dyed hair. She doesn’t notice me standing in a shadowy corner. Outside, the scorching sun bleaches the color out of everything, but here it is pleasantly cool, things retain their edges, everything is as it should be…
And always the aroma of corn coffee in the air.
Ah, my lola… She had a hard life, raising twelve kids, surviving two spouses and a son, and a myriad other heartaches. But there was joy in her cooking and life in her kitchen. “It’s a pity,” my own mother would wistfully say when encountering food she grew up with not prepared properly. “I took Mamá’s cooking for granted, and now I have nothing to show for it.” Well, she has her own memories to deal with.
Lola died in December 1986, seven months into my first year at college. I was busy preparing for the finals and could not make it home for the funeral. As I lay in my bed that night, quietly crying my heart out, I swear I could smell the distinct aroma of sweetened monggos. Made with boiled mung beans, two types of rice (plain and glutinous), and landang (palm flour jelly balls), it was a snack I grew up associating with vigils for the dead. As a kid, I always volunteered to come along during wakes, but only with explicit assurance that the grieving household was serving monggos. Warming and fortifying, monggos to me was proper wake food: food that honored the departed by showing appreciation for the company of the living. But I was not thinking these thoughts on that long, cold December night. All I knew then was that I was alone in a distant city, without the comfort of friends I had yet to make or the food of my lost childhood, and for the first time in my life I felt truly, utterly lost.
Source photos (clockwise from left): Coffee is life, The Delete Bin; No. 1702: Tricks of memory, Engines of Our Ingenuity; The alder copse, Landings; A weekend in silence and remembrance, Paulchen’s FoodBlog; Larena, Siquijor — September 2004, Peace Corps Philippines 2004-2006; Makan à la Pinoy: Embutido, The Northern Dispatch Weekly; The 2 Red Horse Beer, TrekLens; Asian noodles, RecipeTips
Photo text: “past is hidden”, “we do not suspect”; from “The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of the intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.” Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (Random House, 1934)
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