Life is a meal with my mom

“How many of our food memories are connected with our mothers?” Doreen Fernandez, a Filipino cuisine scholar, had posited that interesting question in one of her essays.

When I think of my mom, I find myself attaching images of kare-kare, palabok and turon, and a general feeling of warmth, to the idea of her. Aside from her golden brown hair and manicured nails, what also comes to mind is the strong and rich smell of sautéed garlic and onions wafting from her kitchen.

Relatives, friends, neighbors and even acquaintances would always praise my mom’s cooking, emphasizing her roots as the main reason.

“Kapampangan kasi,” they would say, and mom would only flash a smile.

But I knew this wasn’t the only reason. Before she had my elder sister, my mom didn’t know how to cook aside from shallow frying. It was after she asked for my Aunt Nida’s help that she started to learn how to prepare more complex dishes.

From there, she explored, experimented, persevered and practiced until she was able to master cooking. It is this diligence and patience that has always fascinated me about her. I want to believe that it is motherhood that has made her a great cook.  It is her gift.

The sound of the chopping of onions on the cutting board, and the pungent smell of peeled and minced garlic, are familiar to me; my mom does this ritual in almost every dish she cooks. Cooking involves intricate processes; it takes a lot of patience, talent and passion. Since my father was almost always away working overseas as a seaman, mom was the one in charge of us and the house while we were growing up. It was her cooking that kept us energized and whole every day of our lives.

There are times when I see my mom cooking from morning until sundown, especially during fiesta, Christmas Eve and other family holidays. I remember her scanning through the illustrated food images of “Let’s Cook with Nora,” her damp fingers grazing the smooth white pages. She once told me that in cooking, it isn’t necessary to follow the recipe step by step or to strictly measure the ingredients. One must learn the technique of estimation or pagtatantsa.

Eventually, this taught me not only how to play by the rules but also how to break them creatively. Cooking is an art, I’ve realized. And mom is an artist.

Naturally, I’ve become accustomed to the taste and flavor of her cooking all these years. Mom often says that children eventually come to love their own parents’ cooking because they have no other choice; they just have to get used to the taste of the food they always find at home. She also admitted one time: “Sometimes, I get satiated with the taste of my own cooking.”

That was an immense revelation to me. Ever since I was a kid, I’d always seen her working in the kitchen. I wasn’t allowed to meddle in her kitchen activities except when she would ask me to have a taste of the food she was cooking. So I heaved a sigh of relief when she spoke to me about wanting to taste other people’s cooking. She could also be quite sick of the taste of her own food, and that made her even more endearingly human to me.

I do admire my mom for a lot of things, and that goes especially for her cooking. Every dish she whips up is an enchanting experience for me, and for other people, too. Recently, however, I’ve noticed that her hands already tremble, her memory seems to be fading and her flavors are no longer as consistent. “Maybe it’s too savory? But your kind of savory is so good,” I said, trying to reassure her about the lumpiang shanghai she had made. “Yes, too savory. Too much spice,” she replied in a low voice.

The late chef Nora V. Daza said, “Life is a meal.” One must live it with flavor, spice it up with stories about people, places and things, then serve it with a feast of color. This way, life becomes full and rich.

No question about it: My life is a rich one today because of my mother’s cooking.

Before I turn 30, I hope to get to know my mom even better. Perhaps I will never know her in her entirety — her stories, her secrets, her recipes. I just wish I could continue her legacy of nurturing and feeding her loved ones in the best way she could.

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Aaron Tristan M. De Vera, 20, is a senior communication arts student at the University of the Philippines Los Baños.