‘Bibinquera ng presidente,’ etc.

Doreen G. Fernandez, the pioneering scholar of Philippine food culture, started with a food review column in the pre-martial-law Manila Chronicle, where she shared the byline with her husband Wili: He did the eating while she did the writing. As a professor of English, she learned early on that the real challenge was to transmit the sensory experience of gastronomy in words. She was not one to use the weather-beaten adjective “delicious” and drew from her wide reading, travel and conversations to relate food with literature, history, the arts, geography, even the weather. In time she sought to find in our food that elusive thing we call national identity.

It has been 15 years since Doreen passed away in New York City, but she remains current in the writing of people who had the pleasure to meet her in person, or people who took off from her published writings to go into their own research in Philippine food culture.

I began digging up old notes on food at the time the nation was born after interviewing Gene Gonzalez on the food served during the fiesta to commemorate the ratification of Philippine Independence in September 1898. For almost a century we knew only what the founding fathers had for lunch because the menu was reproduced in Harper’s History of the War in the Philippines (1900)—until I came across the dinner menu in the Museo de Oro in Xavier University, Cagayan de Oro.

I am still hoping to find the breakfast or merienda menus, but the data in the lunch and dinner menus can give us a sense of the pride and celebration that went into those meals. It is something that made Nick Joaquin declare that the Malolos Menu is just as significant as the Malolos Constitution, because it was tangible proof of the birth of the nation.

Biak-na-Bato is just a footnote in Philippine history, but we have the documents on Emilio Aguinaldo’s expenses from May 1897 to February 1898 that can be reviewed for more than mere accounting. In the expenses for July 1897, for example, all written in Tagalog on a ledger, we see the President dispensing doles to the sick, the wounded, and the poor in the amount of P10 since June 7. On the first of July, 4 reales were given to one Captain Martinez for cigarettes—a regular expense, it seems, like food. When cigarettes were unavailable, Aguinaldo spent for tobacco leaf, and I presume the soldiers rolled their own smokes.

On July 2, Pio del Pilar was given P40 to cover his soldiers’ expenses; on July 5, Lt. Victor Samaniego and Treasury Guards were given 4 reales in allowances. Not all our soldiers were Filipino; there were three Spaniards on the payroll identified only as: Ardebol, Martinez, and Lopez, who received P1, 1 real, and 12 centavos. There were entries for clinic attendants and even an herbolario named J. Putex.

The President had more than one cook; the “second cook” was Pedro, who was paid 1 real and 12 centavos. Cook No. 1, or the chief presidential kusinero, was named Ninoy, and there were disbursements for cooks’ salaries on July 14 and 19.

Aguinaldo and his men always paid for food and supplies they took from people in the countryside, unlike the Spanish and American forces who were hated for freeloading. The archival documents show regular disbursements for rice—both polished bigas or unhusked palay—as well as fish and milk. The types of fish were not specified; the milk was not identified as coming from cow, carabao, or goat.

In the 1900 ledger we find disbursements for chicken, eggs, and lechon, but in the years 1897-1898 there are no expenses for meat and poultry. There must have been some celebration or someone’s birthday on June 16, 1897, because there is a record of a merienda. May 25 and 27 list down the expenses of puto served to the soldiers for breakfast. On June 6, 1897, there was a payment for suman consumed by the soldiers, as well as P1 paid for achara, caramel and sugar. In another document there is a disbursement of a salary or honorarium paid to an unidentified woman who was listed only as “bibinquera ng presidente” (or the President’s personal bibingka maker).

Each time I review these lists of  expenses, I realize that God is indeed in the details. In these accounts dismissed
by other historians as trivia, we find  the human face in the struggle for freedom and independence.

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