BAHAY KUBO

 

     There’s an old Filipino folksong that occurred to me all of a sudden in the kitchen while I was washing vegetables in lemon water of soil detritus and other handling impurities before air-drying them in the sun and then storing in the fridge if I’m not cooking right away— and it goes like this: “Bahay kubo hakit munti/ang halaman doon ay sari-sari:/Singkamas at talong/sigarillas at mani/sitaw, bataw, patani…” And then I remembered my grandfather like a watershed moment appearing in the song singing with plantation farmer folks, he was at center looking so much younger, and behind them was it looked like a construction of what would be our family’s ancestral home in the country; the scene was a marvelous serenade, the nostalgia sweet, and realizing the plethora of all the vegetables I was washing and alternately spreading them on a drying mat, psychosomatically and very gently a lineage in my life came full circling in not only in acknowledging the simple beauty of my rural heritage, but also and most touching for me was inheriting my grandfather’s cultural love for peasant food-growing and gardening edible plants. I have written about my grandfather before in this blog, and his remembrance resurfacing in my kitchen time and again as today is inevitable to my cooking. He was, just as my late mother, the pillar of inspiration when it came to my love for vegetables— because I grew up eating and was nourished by them what he grew by hand at our farm. I think my grandfather was a romantic in the sense that folksongs and folk literature transcended in the beauty that he identified with in his homeland and took pride in it, and leading by example inspired his descendants, especially yours truly. I will translate the folksong now hopefully capturing its essential poetry: a humble hut in the countryside/yet its garden teems abundantly/all sorts of vegetables and beans:/jicama, eggplant/peanut, wing and lima beans… I bought a lot of vegetables this morning at the small Filipino grocery in Wailuku (my go-to where the staff and I greet each other by first names) because they looked so fresh and marvelous, the colors so vivid through the tomatoes and halved kombucha squash revealing their seeds, and the medallion-like green papaya and red-bulbed scallions were begging citrus salad. I must have felt my lolo’s (the native word for grandfather) excitement too, subconsciously, because he was a passionate home cook, as I am, and in turn after harvesting all the vegetables on the farm he'd awe us gathered around the table when it came to lunch (I’m preparing mine too, inveterately), and I think we felt each other across time and space. The delicious-factor (a l a chef) I believe I picked up culinarily from the food presented for us, I think as young and naive I was in the workings involved in the kitchen back then, I had sensed there was something intrinsically special about how they smelled and looked, intentionally, and my lolo’s genes in me were wiring up. Anthony Bourdain said that the nothing could match home food cooked with love and deep understanding of your bayang magiliw cuisine’s finest alchemy (from my sweet country). So... what to do with all these halamans before me? Easy. I am my grandfather now and will cook and serve my brood and farm helpers and together we gather at the communal table laid out with banana fronds and have a feast from my labor of love. I’ll start grilling the tomatoes and okras brushing them with calamansi juice to smoke out the lemon flavor. Cook green papaya ginger soup, yes. Sautéed wing beans with sweet potatoes. Lima beans squash-mash with rice and mushrooms (my favorite spoonable). And pickled long beans with chili pepper water. Come folks food is ready! Or better, for old time's sake: “Come my friends, 'tis not too late to seek a newer world. For my purpose holds to [cook] beyond the sunset. And 'tho we are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are we are— one equal [man] of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will, to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” (Lord Alfred Tennyson).