(This essay won the 2010 Doreen Gamboa Fernandez Writing Contest. This year the theme for the contest: Breakfast)
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In Surigao City, the first meal of the day is often at the mercy of the fisherman’s haul. It has been a tradition since time immemorial. However, for my great-aunt Sylvia, the first taste in her mouth is the blessed bread placed on her tongue during her daily morning communion. She eschews the watered down wine and sits alone at a pew and prays.
Every day at 4:30 am, she opens her eyes and lies for several minutes on the bed. Then, she stretches and blows out a sigh. Her right hand brings the pendant of San Nicolas, the patron saint of the city, to her lips.
There is no light in the room. The sun pushes the snooze button of its own alarm for another hour, and Mama Bebing—the name I affectionately call her—loathes the glare from the overhead bulb. So she dresses herself in the dark and dons her widow’s weeds by memory. Her stomach grumbles as she walks out of the house and into the streets that is slowly awakening. The scent of baking pan de sal wafts into the streets; it tempts her hunger but she turns away and heads to the church only a few blocks away. Mama Bebing breaks her fast with the Lord.
While my great-aunt is in church, my grandmother, Mama Ching, who lives in the same whitewashed home surrounded by fragrant trees—tambis, guava and dama de noche—and pastel colored bougainvillea bushes, shuffles downstairs to the kitchen to grab two woven baskets. Lithe and willowy, she is a resolute warrior—especially in the kitchen.
She and cousin Lillia head to the tabo, the farmer’s market, where they haggle with vendors. There, transactions are battles waged over stalls of produce brought in from the lush farms in the hills and plains outside the city. Mama Ching’s weapons are the raising of a single, sharp, penciled eyebrow and the wave of a long, slim finger. She used to work in Customs; she has dealt with more vitriolic language and aggressive opponents. Wanting a fair price for a kilo of kangkong is an easy skirmish.
The fish market at the old pier is a different culture, however. Behind the long tables, fishermen with hairs bleached by the sea and sun slosh in puddles of entrails, scales, and tentacles. Initially, they flirt with the two petite women. After a few minutes, they start to plea with them to buy the seafood at market prices. Then, they succumb to the insistent pressure of wanting a good deal.
Within the hour, Mama Ching and Lillia are armed with heaps of seafood, meats and vegetables. In one basket are giant prawns, fish, purple mottled squid, and dayo dayo, or blue-black snails. The other basket is laden with mustard greens, unripe papaya, purple eggplants and multicolored silis. They also balance bags of buyad, fatty pork rump and whole native chickens with those containing saba bananas and freshly grated coconut.
When the bells peal at 6am, Mama Ching and Lillia head back to Amat Street, where our home is located, and Mama Bebing emerges from the church and walks into the light. By that hour, the sky has transformed; the indigo and purple strata have been replaced by a wash of light blue. Outside, vendors have readied their kiosks with seasonal fruits—peeled and sliced green mangos with rock salt, santol, and other spiny, sweet, and sour offerings. The panaderias have opened. Mama Bebing buys 3 paper bags filled with hot, crusty bread.
This is a tableau of life in Surigao City—a picture of many summer mornings I have spent there.
In the capital of the northernmost eponymous province of Mindanao, its people eat six times a day. Breakfast, however, is when the entire household gathers fuel, stamina and ideas to tackle the day. When I used to spend summer vacations in the whitewashed home, where my mother grew up, I used to think it was an anomaly of our home to taste the bounty of the sea just after the morning sky had split open. I have lived for most of my life in Washington, DC, where people struggle to keep up with the cycles of life and work. Quick and efficient breakfasts are de rigueur. When I was younger, I used to ask Mama Ching where the toaster-oven, ready-made pancakes drizzled with sticky, golden amber syrup from plastic packets and the bowls of cereal doused by cold, fresh milk were.
Surigao reminds one that its pace of life is like the rhythm of ripples in a lagoon. One does not shovel breakfast in one’s mouth. One sits back and stirs the granules of sugar into a cup of coffee until they dissolve. That is the gift of time.
One can watch platters being paraded in and placed on the table in the dining room that opens into the courtyard. One can smell the steam rising from tinuya, fish cooked in clear broth with tanglad, lemons and onions. One has time to marvel at the striking strokes of paint: the vermilion chilies swimming in dark soy sauce, the caramelized yellow of fried bananas topped with rock crystals, or the albino landscape of plain, white rice in a ceramic bowl. One can relish the interplay of savory and sweet, and of salty and tang, in the offered dishes. The tongue can run the myriad textures of the morning, like nilupak, ground steamed saba blended with shredded coconut.
When did my senses first awaken to such culinary spiritualism?
It was during the last summer I spent with my great-uncle, Papa Te. He was Mama Bebing’s husband and Mama Ching’s youngest brother. The routine, then, was the same. Mama Bebing brought home bread after church, and Mama Ching brought home spoils after waging war with farmers and fishermen. Papa Te would sit on the bench outside of his sari-sari store and wait. During that summer, I would wake up early to join him. He was also whittling or whistling. One morning, he was telling me stories from the war and why he learned to speak Japanese. I knew he was quite sick, but he never showed it.
Back then, I was a college hotshot at 20. I thought the world was my oyster. Papa Te asked if I had ever eaten one—the kind from shells larger than a soccer ball. Had I ever eaten soup made from turtle? Had I ever scooped the flesh from cheek and jaws of large tuna? Had I ever eaten purple rice? I shook my head. Papa Te asked if I even noticed how delicious breakfast at home in Surigao was. Do I remember its array of tastes and smells when I go back to school? Do I eat in the morning and appreciate what’s been given, or do I rush to class?
Breakfast is important, he said. It is the first communion with God and the first communication with one’s family after sleep. It is the expression of love and appreciation. He said this as he watched his wife return. We followed her into courtyard, where we ate our pan de sal withlatik, or jam made from boiling shreds of young coconut for a long time. It was brown and viscous. It was cloying, but delicious. My father used to spoon latik over just ripened mangoes and mushy avocados. Cousins, uncles and aunts—all of who shared the home—broke their fasts with pan de sal. Some ate their shares with latik, while others preferred them plain or with white cheese made from buffalo milk.
Several minutes later, Mama Bebing returned with two cups of tsokolate. She had dropped rounds of tableas into boiling water and mixed in a few tablespoons of cane sugar and evaporated milk. We dipped our breads in this and caught the sagging ends and trailing chocolate with our mouths. Immediately, the brew scalded my tongue, but I could taste its sweet bitterness. It was heaven.
Papa Te mentioned that our neighbors across the street start their mornings drinking rice coffee. I had thought that this was a concoction distilled from beans grown in paddies. Instead, grains of rice were toasted until slightly charred (this depended on how one preferred the coffee’s strength). Then boiling water was poured over the brown-black bits, which then settled to the bottom. The liquid was strained and mixed with brown sugar and fresh milk.
After our first breakfast, Mama Ching announced that the real one was ready. We took our places at the table, where rice—either steamed or sautéed with lots of garlic—replaced bread. Also on the table was paksiw. Anduhaw, a silver fish, had been simmered in coconut vinegar. Several cloves of crushed garlic, slices of ginger, and a long hot pepper had been added to the broth. Chopped eggplant and ampalaya had also been mixed in, and finally oil was drizzled atop the paksiw once it was done. This dish embodied the Surigao breakfast.
That morning, we also ate buyad, or sundried, squid and daing of danggit that was paired with paco, steamed curly ferns, and a salad of seaweed that looked like miniature green grapes. Eggs from native chicken were fried. I pierced the bright persimmon colored yolk of my egg until it ran like syrup over the rice. It is slighty sweeter than the regular variety. It was better than pancakes with maple syrup. I paired the slickness with the crispiness of torta of dumudot, or fried anchovy cakes that resembled ukoy and which I dipped into a sawsawan of palm vinegar, sili and garlic. With my hands, I also peeled plump prawns that had been sautéed with garlic. Papa Te, who sat beside me, told me to suck the juice out of the heads.
At the end of the meal, we had a choice of sweets to finish our meals. There was moron, naturally purple glutinous rice, grown on the mountainsides nearby. It had been boiled with brown sugar and coconut milk and then steamed in banana leaves. Budbud and sayonsong—similar versions with white rice or cassava—were placed at the table.
Since that meal, I paid attention to what we ate every morning. There were certain dishes—like rice, the paksiw, the buyad and the tinuya as well as the fruits and vegetables—that were served every day. The dishes that accompanied them changed. Sometimes we enjoy torta of talong, boiled saba with ginamos, or cured anchovies, or giniling na baboy, or ground pork sautéed with longbeans and chilis. These were the vertebrae of our mornings.
By the end of that vacation, I understood what Papa Te was trying to tell me: Look, understand and appreciate what’s in front of you. Time doesn’t stop, and it certainly doesn’t care if I eat instant pancakes or bouillabaisse of shrimp. Life whizzes by, and if I rush I will never savor the glorious goodness of a Surigao breakfast, a meal with my raucous family, or a morning with a great-uncle.
Several summers have passed since his death, and I am now in my mid-thirties. The years between visits back to Surigao have stretched out so that homecomings are sweeter and more poignant. Loved ones have more gray in their hairs and slowness in their steps. I was last there in September 2009. Without knowing when I would be back in Surigao, I delighted in everything—from the foods lovingly prepared for me at each meal to the quiet moments I spent listening to the wisdom, stories and recipes of my elders. There, in Surigao, is a rich legacy I hope to one day pass on to my son. One such inheritance is the value of the morning gathering—the breakfast.
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