One of my most potent memories of Dad is when he’s in the kitchen. While I’m working on the computer or reading, he is going back and forth, chopping, boiling, washing, taste-testing. I hear pans smacking on the stove, cups and bowls clattering in the sink as he’s done with them. An inviting aroma emanates from the kitchen, then he calls, “Kain na!”
During busy weekdays, Dad could sling together a full meal within an hour. An unusual experience is leftover night, when one eats what appears to be sotanghon and detects a different taste, suspiciously like the chicken adobo the previous night. But his favorite day for cooking is Sunday. That’s when all of the sons and daughters come home with their spouses or boyfriends or girlfriends. On Sundays, Dad would leave early in the morning for his favorite haunt, which until recently was Nepa Q Mart in Cubao. He would come home happily burdened with seafood – alimasag, alimango, sugpo, tahong, bangus. There would be ripe and green mangoes, a stack of vegetables for the special dish he has in mind, and his beloved saging na saba. Once the dishes are laid out on the table, no visitor could refuse a second helping of pakbet, sinigang, or his special pansit spaghetti.
I am not sure if his Kapampangan blood urged him to create wonders in the kitchen. Is it from learning or leaning? I have tried my hand in the kitchen with varied results. What I remember as being distinct and disastrous is the first time I made sinigang. Perhaps I was 13 years old. I tasted and tasted the brew. It persisted in being bland so I added what must have later amounted to a fistful of salt.
The next thing I knew, I was hiding under a blanket in my room while Dad stood in the doorway, cold anger emanating from his silhouette. He did not spank me but his furious baritone was enough to send rats scampering to their hidey holes. “Sayang ang pagkain!” he thundered. From then on I stuck to pasta, where browning the meat and making al dente noodles are the only kind of outcomes I’m concerned about.
I often wondered how Dad managed to get the right taste when he had a poor sense of smell. Our mom said his olfactory capabilities were destroyed during his time in the research lab. Yet he could concoct the appropriate mix of salty, sweet or sour flavor.
My regret is that I never asked for his secret. I know he thickened the sinigang soup with lots of my favorite gabi, but how does he make it mouthwateringly maasim? How does he make the delectable pakbet with the squishy soft squash, crunchy sitaw and okra, the succulent talong? And of course, the pansit spaghetti. Who would teach me now?
There was one secret he taught me, though. One time, while flavoring the stew, he told me he gives one pinch of salt for every member of the family sitting down to dinner. “Then I add one more,” he said, whisking in a final pinch. “That’s for Ate Fevi.”
Dad never forgot our dead sister. And he never spoke much of her later on. But I knew how much he loved and missed her. That love for Ate Fevi, for his wife and sons and daughters, was embodied in every dash of salt and every meal he cooked. That love is what really made Dad’s dishes taste heavenly.