Who’s way is better? Add a dash of dispute to taste

I’m half Filipino from my mother’s side, and my other half is mostly Danish American. I like to talk about my family a lot on this site because a lot of things in life I associate with my family. There are a lot of things our parents try to teach us, but when you’re young and have the attention span of a pigeon eying something shiny one after another, lessons don’t really hit home until you revisit them in adulthood.

I can remember my mom trying to get me to observe while she cooked, as her mother told her to watch her. Maybe she was better at obeying her mother than I was because a lot of times I’d stay for a couple things to hit the pan and my attention would fly elsewhere. Her lessons and words weren’t spent in vain. I’m well into adulthood and spending a lot of my China experience in the kitchens of other families.

Recipes held within families, generation after generation, are what I seek while I travel. Quite often I stand in a kitchen with a few adults from one family; one family member demonstrating how to cook a dish while a spouse, parent, or sibling hovers over their shoulder disputing the amount of an ingredient to add or how to cook the dish. This is the funny twist in the family recipe lessons I encounter. There’s never one way to cook a dish. While I find the conflict endearing, the kitchen temperature rises a little and the heat isn’t coming from the wok.

I just read an article that hit a little more close to home, “Filipino food: Off the menu” ( Amy Scattergood, For the Los Angeles Times, February 25, 2010).

“The food is so regional, we don’t have one unifying dish,” says Marvin Gapultos, a Filipino American who runs the Los Angeles food blog Burnt Lumpia. “There’s adobo, but there’s about 7,000 ways to make it.”

I recently posted a recipe for My Mother’s Pork Adobo and a family discussion over which vinegar to use sent heat waves all the way over to me in Beijing, warming me while winter has yet to end. A lot of things in life would be more simple if there were just one way to see, do, or cook things. But rather than have a holy war over who’s methods are the truth, I’m with Marvin Gapultos; there are thousands of way to make it, and that’s in the Philippines alone.

I don’t know how the first Adobo tasted, but I have a hunch that if a few family members didn’t play tug-of-method for generations, Adobo wouldn’t have evolved into one of my favorites today.

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