The Edible Evolution of Filipino Food, Bite by Bite
The current dining experience is as unique as the creators making the dishes
Though I am, by many accounts, my father’s daughter, my mother has given me two of my most indelible features: her looks and her love of vinegar. One of the first dishes she ever made me was sinigang, an indigenous soup unique for its sour and savory flavor profile — as if a tamarind tree dipped its branches in the ocean and shook its fruit across your tongue. It’s the first dish my mother ever learned to cook herself, the first she ever cooked for me, and, not coincidentally, the one we both love most.
While my understanding of Tagalog was limited, my memories of Filipino flavors — and the ways I encountered and reencountered them out in the world — felt inexhaustible, even though there was no Filipino restaurant in the northern Virginia suburbs where I grew up. In high school, I sought out salt and vinegar chips in the snack aisle — their taste recalling that salt-sour one-two punch I experienced while eating green mango and rock salt as a midafternoon merienda after school. (Though, of course, it lacked the bright, tart smack of that underripe fruit.) When I went to college down in North Carolina, I learned that what I had known as chicharrón could also be called pork rinds.
