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A Manly Man’s Dish

“There are as many versions of the adobo as there are casual Filipino home chefs” is the conventional wisdom about adobo’s ubiquity. For this reason, it is considered as the country’s unofficial national dish. In our household, the preferred flavor combination for an adobo is the sour-bitter-salty-sweet blend, which is achieved by fusing the Tagalog adobo with the Visayan humba. Vinegar provides its sourness, soy-sauce, its bitter saltiness, and brown sugar, most of its sweetness.

The Philippine adobo was inspired by the Spanish adobado, but did away with marinating the meats before cooking. Instead, it went straight to slow-cooking the meats in a cooking liquid of vinegar and soy sauce mixed in with smashed garlic, pieces of bay leaf, and crushed whole peppercorns. This liquid and the meats’ natural juices thicken in a simmer into a flavorful sauce.

The humba, on the other hand, is based on the Chinese hong-ba, alternatively called Fujianese or Hokkienese pork stew. It has the same cooking liquid as the adobo, but with black beans and muscovado sugar added to it. It is left to simmer for a much longer time until the pork is crumbly tender. The process makes for a sweeter and stickier sauce.

The men in my family, which includes my husband down to my grand little boys, go all gaga over my mestizo version of the humble chicken/pork adobo, especially when I add chicken liver and hardboiled eggs. My four grandchildren especially love the hardboiled eggs that are coated a tasty saucy brown. Sometimes this is all they eat of the adobo. As for the adults, all the goodness of the sauce when combined with the rich and metallic foie gras taste of the chicken liver give them a more exciting eating experience.

My guys turn deliriously happy and satisfied, pairing this flavorful, protein-rich dish with steaming white rice. They pour the sauce over the mound of rice but before digging in, they spear an egg with the fork, take a quick bite, then shovel rice after it. I don’t know what it is with Filipino men and rice. Adobo on rice is the quintessential Filipino men’s any-time-of-the-day meal. And, why not? Adobo keeps well and tends to “age” with the passing of time. All the adobo-eating Filipinos will swear by their religion that adobo gets more scrumptious when stored in the refrigerator for days.

During our nine-year courtship, my husband preferred to dispatch a house help or a fraternity neophyte to bring me a potful of his mother’s cooking in lieu of flowers and chocolates. Not so romantic, I know. On our three-day honeymoon in a mountain resort overlooking the tranquil waters of Taal Lake and the volcano in the middle of it, he brought along a big potful of his mom’s adobo and a smaller pot of cooked rice. I smiled at the thought that maybe he just wanted to cuddle up with me for the whole stay by dining in. But, just as swiftly, I winced, thinking that maybe he was being cheap and would not want to spend on dinner in the resort’s pricey restaurant. Turned out, it was both. We stayed in the whole time, subsisting only on love and his Nanay Sinay’s adobo. Aging ever so gracefully, the adobo kept for three days without refrigeration. The mountain chill helped keep it and the rice from spoiling.

How adobo came to be a part of my childhood food memory, I attribute to my Aunt Biven, a Bicolana married to a Chinese expatriate from mainland China. She used to cook it for us when we visit them at their palatial home in Naga. After the grueling 12-hour train ride from Manila aboard the Bicol Express (a Bicol dish soon appropriated this name), her huge round dining table awaits laden with dishes she cooked herself.

Aunt Biven is the youngest sister of my mom. Close in age, they were also dearest to each other’s heart. Despite her wealth acquired by marriage to a successful Chinese trader, she was self-effacing to my mom, always aiming to please her and by extension, her many children. I remember my first-class train rides to Bicol in air-conditioned coaches and having sit-down meals in the formal dining car with her.

With her only daughter living away from home as an interna in an expensive all-girls college in Manila, Aunt Biven took to plucking my mom’s children one by one, sometimes two at a time, for an all-expense-paid extended summers with her in the province. She delights in taking us shopping, visiting her farm tended by our grandparents, accompanying her in business meetings, involving us in her gardening, and parading us before her friends as her smart and good-looking sobrinos from Manila. It was a long way for my aunt who lived in biting poverty in a rural town and who, with my mom, was forced to earn a living at a young age dancing with the male clientele of a saloon many miles distant from home.

Aunt Biven was a natural when it comes to cooking. Meticulous in her preparations and with sensitive taste buds for flavors, she quickly mastered Chinese cooking, improved on well-loved Bicol recipes, and forayed into other types of cuisines. It helped, too, that she had a crew of trained maids, one charcoal-fired “dirty kitchen”, and a bigger well-appointed formal kitchen. Before long, some of her dishes, especially this adobo variant, became a big part of our family’s culinary repertoire.

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