Ask ten Filipino families for their adobo and you'll get ten adobos. One is dark with toyo (soy sauce). One has no soy sauce at all. One is yellow with turmeric, another is finished with coconut milk. Every family will tell you theirs is the right one, and none of them will give you exact amounts.
That's the best place to start, because Filipino food is less a set of fixed recipes than a handful of instincts shared across more than 7,600 islands: a love of sour, the habit of letting everyone season their own plate, rice at the center of every meal, and a knack for taking whatever arrived by boat and making it Filipino.
Sour comes first
Most cuisines use sour as an accent. Filipino cooking builds on it. Asim, sourness, is the backbone of the country's best-known dishes:
- Adobo: meat simmered in suka (vinegar) with garlic, bay leaves and black pepper. The Spanish named it after a marinade of their own, but cooking in vinegar and salt was here long before they were.
- Sinigang: a sour broth with pork, shrimp or fish and vegetables. Most families sour it with sampalok (tamarind); others use kamias, bayabas (guava), green mango, batuan or calamansi, depending on the region and what's on the tree.
- Kinilaw: raw fish “cooked” in vinegar or citrus with ginger, onion and chili, one of the oldest ways of eating fish in the islands. Archaeologists digging at Butuan, in Mindanao, found fish bones beside halved tabon-tabon, a fruit cooks there still use to take the fishy edge off kinilaw.
- Paksiw: fish or meat simmered in vinegar until the sauce cooks down, a dish made to keep.
Part of the reason is practical. In a hot, humid country, long before refrigerators, vinegar and salt kept food safe for days, and dishes like adobo and paksiw taste even better the next day. Filipino kitchens keep more than one vinegar, too: sukang iloko from sugarcane, aged in clay jars in the Ilocos; sukang paombong from nipa palm sap in Bulacan; sukang tuba from coconut. Each tastes different, so a Filipino recipe that only says “vinegar” is leaving something out.
The dish is finished at the table
In a lot of kitchens, the cook decides exactly how a dish should taste. At a Filipino table, the cook gets it most of the way there and the sawsawan, the dipping sauces, do the rest. A small saucer sits beside each plate, and everyone mixes their own:
- Patis (fish sauce) with a squeeze of calamansi, for nilaga and tinola
- Toyomansi, soy sauce with calamansi, for fried fish and grilled pork
- Sukang sawsawan, vinegar with crushed garlic, onion and siling labuyo, for lechon kawali, chicharon and anything fried
- Bagoong alamang (shrimp paste), for kare-kare and green mango
Kare-kare shows how far this goes. The peanut sauce around the oxtail is gentle, almost bland on its own, because it's made to be eaten with a dab of salty, funky bagoong on every bite. Without the bagoong, the dish isn't finished.
The same instinct is behind the pairings that surprise people new to Filipino food. Dinuguan, a dark, rich pork stew made with blood, is eaten with sweet puto (steamed rice cakes). Champorado, chocolate rice porridge, comes with salty tuyo (dried fish). Lechon gets a sweet, tangy liver sauce. Filipino cooks are always balancing alat (salty), asim (sour) and tamis (sweet), and they make room for pait (bitter), too: in ampalaya (bitter melon), and in the Ilocano soup papaitan, which gets its bite from bile.
Salty, funky, fermented
Some of the deepest flavors in Filipino cooking come from fermentation. Bagoong is salted, fermented shrimp (alamang) or fish (isda), cooked into dishes like pinakbet and binagoongan or eaten on the side. Patis is the clear amber liquid that collects as fish ferments in salt. In Pampanga, burong isda ferments rice and fish together into a sour, pungent sauce for mustasa (mustard greens) and boiled vegetables. Add tuyo and daing, salted fish dried in the sun, and you have the smell of a Filipino breakfast. A little goes a long way, and that's the point.
Rice is the meal
A Filipino meal is kanin (rice) and ulam, whatever you eat with it. A table without rice is a snack, no matter how much else is on it. That's why so many Filipino dishes are boldly seasoned: adobo, sinigang and bistek are made to be stretched over a mound of rice, with the sauce or the sabaw (broth) spooned straight onto it.
Rice turns up in every other form, too. Yesterday's rice is fried with lots of garlic into sinangag, the base of a silog breakfast: tapa, longganisa or tocino with sinangag and itlog (egg), which is where tapsilog, longsilog and tosilog get their names. Rice simmered soft becomes lugaw, arroz caldo with chicken and ginger, or goto with tripe. And it becomes kakanin, the rice cakes of every merienda and fiesta: puto, bibingka, suman, kutsinta, sapin-sapin.
Coconut, in almost everything
The coconut palm gives Filipino cooks milk, cream, oil, vinegar and sugar, and the young leaves Cebuanos weave into pouches for puso, hanging rice. Gata (coconut milk) and kakang gata (the thick first press, coconut cream) turn a dish into ginataan: ginataang kalabasa at sitaw, squash and long beans in coconut milk; ginataang hipon, with shrimp; ginataang bilo-bilo, the merienda of sticky rice balls, saba bananas and langka (jackfruit).
In Bicol, gata meets siling labuyo. Laing is taro leaves simmered down in coconut milk; Bicol Express is pork cooked in it with plenty of chili. Even adobo has a coconut version, adobo sa gata.
Borrowed, then made Filipino
The Philippines sat on the trade routes for centuries, and its kitchens show every visitor.
From China came noodles, soy sauce, tofu and spring rolls, brought by traders and settlers who were mostly Hokkien speakers, and the names came with them: pancit, toyo, tokwa and lumpia all come from Hokkien words.
From Spain, which ruled for more than three centuries, came dishes with Spanish names: menudo, afritada, kaldereta, mechado, leche flan. But much of what Spain brought arrived by way of Mexico, on the Manila galleons that sailed to Acapulco and back from 1565 to 1815: corn, tomatoes, chocolate, avocado, sayote (chayote). Champorado takes its name from Mexico's champurrado.
From the United States came evaporated milk, canned corned beef and hot dogs, which Filipinos turned into something no American would recognize: sweet spaghetti with sliced hot dogs, made with banana ketchup. That ketchup is credited to the food scientist María Orosa, who wanted a sauce made from Philippine fruit instead of imported tomatoes.
What makes this Filipino, rather than a museum of other people's food, is what happened next. Doreen Fernandez, the country's best-known food historian, called it indigenization: each borrowed dish was remade with local ingredients and the local taste for sour and salty until it belonged here. Pancit became dozens of regional pancits. Kaldereta picked up liver spread and cheese. The Mexican tamal, made with corn, became Pampanga's tamales, made with ground rice and wrapped in banana leaves.
Nothing goes to waste
A whole pig means a celebration, and every part of it gets used. Dinuguan uses the blood. Sisig uses the head, and it's older than it looks: a Kapampangan dictionary from 1732 records sisig as a salad of green papaya or guava in vinegar, and the sizzling plate of chopped pig's ears and cheeks came much later, in 1974, from Lucia Cunanan, Aling Lucing, in Angeles City.
Isaw, grilled chicken or pork intestines on a stick, is street food. Kare-kare uses oxtail and tripe, papaitan uses innards, and yesterday's lechon becomes paksiw na lechon, simmered in vinegar with its own liver sauce. Thrift, turned into some of the best-loved food in the country.
Many islands, many kitchens
“Filipino food” is really a family of regional cuisines:
- Ilocos: Ilocano cooking is lean and full of vegetables: pinakbet seasoned with bagoong isda, bagnet (pork belly boiled, dried and deep-fried until it shatters), and that sugarcane vinegar.
- Pampanga: often called the country's culinary capital. Sisig, tocino and burong isda all come from Kapampangan kitchens.
- Bicol: gata and sili, in almost everything.
- The Visayas: Iloilo gives the world La Paz batchoy, a noodle soup with pork, liver and chicharon, and KBL: kadyos (pigeon peas), baboy (pork) and unripe langka, soured with batuan. Cebu's lechon is stuffed with tanglad (lemongrass) and garlic and needs no sauce at all.
- Mindanao and Sulu: Muslim communities cook without pork, with flavors shared with the wider Malay world. Maranao cooks keep palapa, a condiment of sakurab (a native scallion), ginger, chili and toasted coconut; the Tausug make tiyula itum, a beef soup turned black with charred coconut.
“Kumain ka na?”
The most Filipino thing about Filipino food may be a question. “Kumain ka na?” (Have you eaten?) is how Filipinos say hello, check on each other, and say “I care about you” without saying it. Food is meant to be shared. At a kamayan or a boodle fight, rice and ulam are laid down a long table on banana leaves and everyone eats with their hands. There's merienda between meals, pasalubong for the people back home, and nobody leaves a party without a plate wrapped up to take with them.
It's also why Filipino recipes are so hard to write down. They're learned at the stove, by watching: “konting patis lang,” just a little fish sauce; “tantsahin mo na lang,” just eyeball it; cook it until it smells right. The amounts live in someone's hands, and so does the dish.
Further reading: Doreen G. Fernandez, Tikim: Essays on Philippine Food and Culture (1994), and Edilberto N. Alegre and Doreen G. Fernandez, Kinilaw: A Philippine Cuisine of Freshness (1991).