By Pennie Azarcon-dela Cruz, Executive Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine
REMEMBER that old saw about making sure you’re not hungry when you go shopping? Well, my corollary to that is, never never watch “Eat Drink Man Woman” when you haven’t had a meal.
The first time I caught this Ang Lee movie on late TV was way past dinner, so that by the end of the opening scene where this longtime widower is shown filleting fish, blanching vegetables, chopping squid, delicately twisting siomao wrappers and deep frying the Peking duck that he had just blown up like a balloon, I felt like licking the TV screen, drooling desperately for some Chinese food.
How can you resist such a tempting premise? You know that the deft slicing, chopping and kneading of meat, vegetables and dough are a prelude to something even better. Like the isolated notes on a music sheet, you just know there’s a symphony waiting to float out into the air once those notes are strung together on an instrument. The promise of several sumptuous dishes are evident behind all that steam and sizzle and in the furrowed brow concentration that the aging Chinese chef invests on his kitchen labor.
But if there’s one scene that instantly activates my salivary glands, it is that which shows the elderly Chinese patriarch lifting a slab of fatty pork from a vat of boiling oil. Turning to a bowl filled with water by his elbow, he quickly dips this chunk of pure cholesterol into the icy bath, producing a sizzle so powerful it still inhabits my dreams. Suddenly the smooth pork rind erupts into rough craters that you just know must have made for the crispiest lechong kawali hereabouts.
If Freud were to psychoanalyze my fascination for today’s cooking shows, he would have run smack into this movie that, looking back now, fairly describes my life so far. Well, a fairly accurate recipe of it, anyway.
Basically, the movie follows a Chinese family — a master chef and his three grown-up daughters as they partake of a festive Sunday lunch painstakingly prepared by the widowed father. Some reviewers see the huge mounds of food as an inadvertent barrier that block off conversation among the diners, who each nurse secret dreams and frustrations they’re too polite to articulate. The movie, Ang Lee himself admits, is about families and how they communicate. “Sometimes the things children need to hear are often the things that parents find hardest to say, and vice versa. When that happens, we resort to ritual. For the Chu family, the ritual is the Sunday dinner.”
Ang Lee might have been talking about our own Sunday dinners back when I was young and single and sharing meals with my parents and five other siblings in our renovated home in Tondo. In the movie, the chef’s passion for cooking hides his inability to express his affection for his three daughters. In our household, Nanay’s passion to fire up the stove parallels her desire to make her daughters meet the accepted standards of the day. In cash-starved Tondo, this meant robust cheeks, glowing skin and well-groomed hair that marked one as well-nourished (read: rich) and not coincidentally, blessed with an ideal mom who is also an accomplished cook. It must have pained Nanay to think herself being publicly judged by her daughters’ unfashionably-thin arms and scraggly hair, so Sunday lunch often meant such calorific offerings as either pinatisang baboy (porkchop steeped in patis and calamansi and fried to a crisp), nilagang manok, the soup redolent with the native chicken’s yellowish fat, her suicidal kalderetang baka made thicker and richer with coconut milk, grated cheese and chopped pork liver, and her specialty, tinumis, a thick stew of pork, liver, spleen and blood much like dinuguan except it was chunkier and infinitely more lethal.
Few words were exchanged over this family feast, not because we had trouble communicating our thoughts but more because our mouths were too full and busy for talk. If there were any festering frustrations kept under lid, that would be Nanay’s, who was probably thinking up more deadly dishes to fatten up her daughters. Or okay, mine, thinking of how it would be so embarrassing to bring such leftovers for school lunch when my classmates had hotdog, spaghetti, pork and beans or fried chicken, newfangled dishes that these Americans were eating in such popular TV shows at that time such as “Leave It to Beaver” and “Bonanza.”
Talk about family legacy! The huge Sunday lunch eventually found a permanent niche in my hips and waistline. Nanay’s passion for cooking similarly rubbed off on me, maybe through osmosis, although the calorific dishes remain mostly in the realm of my fantasies and childhood memories in deference to the fitness lifestyle we’ve been trying to maintain. When time and schedule permits, I still cook a festive Sunday lunch and, like “Eat Drink Man Woman,” the meals are quickly consumed in silence. That is, if burps, slurps and the clink of dueling spoons and forks don’t count.
For more sumptuous offerings on screen and how these movies have become a ritual of sorts for most Filipinos, read the Sunday Inquirer Magazine. Out this Sunday with your copy of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
