Jose Rizal was a keen observer of culinary methods and techniques, and his interest in food found its way into some of his writings.
My favorite scenes in books often involve feasts and meals, and some of the most unforgettable scenes in Rizal’s novels Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo describe the preparation and eating of various dishes from Filipino, Chinese, and Spanish colonial cuisine.
Rizal himself was well-fed as a boy growing up in Calamba, according to Felice Sta. Maria in her book The Foods of Jose Rizal (2012). ‘Moy,’ as he was known to his family as a boy, ate fried rice, meat, and fish as a toddler; to this diet were added fruits and vegetables to make him healthier. When Rizal’s mother went shopping, she made sure to stock up on “chorizos de Bilbao, cheese, and butter.”
Their cook, Valentina Sanchez, recalled that “the family fare included relleno, adobo, estofado, puchero, tinola, and fried chicken.” Rizal, she says, liked pansit, but his favorite dish was “carneng asada, or beefsteak with sauce.” He loved champorado; there was a time he asked the cook to give him some am (watery rice), which he mixed with tablea chocolate and sugar and ate with relish.
Noli Me Tangere, Rizal’s first novel, was published in 1887. One of its famous scenes is in Chapter 3, ‘At Dinner’. [All quotes below from Noli and Fili are from the Leon Ma. Guerrero translation.] Tinola (ginger chicken stew) is served to the guests at Capitan Tiago’s party, and a Spanish friar is annoyed at the meagerness of his serving:
“Whether by oversight or otherwise, Father Damaso’s portion turned out to be composed of a lot of squash and broth with barely a chicken neck and wing, while his fellow guests were eating chicken legs and chicken breasts, and Ibarra had the luck of drawing the giblets. The Franciscan, seeing this, mashed the squash violently, took a few spoonfuls of broth, and then loudly dropped his spoon and pushed his plate away.”
Also memorable is the “chocolate” scene in Ch. 11, ‘The Bosses’:
“So you’re going to the parish house to visit Father Wouldn’t-Hurt-A-Fly {Fr. Salvi]! Look out! If he offers you chocolate, which I doubt, but anyway if he does offer it, keep your ears open. If he calls the servant and tells him, ‘So-and-so, make a pot of chocolate, eh’, then you can rest easy; but if he says, ‘So-and-so, make a pot of chocolate, ah’, then you’d better pick up your hat and get away at a run.”
Both Noli and Fili were written in Spanish; the joke Rizal makes here is that ‘eh’ and ‘ah’ are Salvi’s codewords for the quality of the chocolate to be served to guests, the former meaning ‘espeso’—thick, and the latter ‘aguada’, watery.
In Noli’s Ch. 23, some of the characters spend a playful day of music and flirting at a fishpond, where the women cook up the bounties of farm and river:
“Andeng…prepared rice water, tomatoes, and kamias [for the sinigang broth]…the other girls peeled squash, shucked peas, or cut spring onions into pieces the size of cigarettes… Aunt Isabel…assigned the various kinds of fish to different native dishes: ‘The ayungin is good for the sinigang. Leave the biya for the escabeche. The dalag and the buan-buan for the pesa, the dalag will last longer. Put them in the net so they can stay in the water. The lobsters to the frying pan! The banak is to be roasted, wrapped in banana leaves, and stuffed with tomatoes.’”
In the ‘pansiteria’ scene in Fili (1891), part of Ch. 25, ‘Laughter and Tears’, fourteen rowdy college students hold a dinner at the Macao ‘Good Taste’ Restaurant to “mark the decision taken on the teaching of Spanish”:
“’Gentlemen,’ announced Makaraig, ‘noodles lang-lang make the soup without compare!…it is made with mushrooms, prawns or shrimps, beaten egg, rice noodles, chicken, and God knows what else.’” He enumerates the other dishes he ordered: Chinese lumpia with pork, crab omelette, and stewed noodles.
All the dishes Rizal mentioned are still part of our cuisine today.
Noli and Fili were written and published abroad; both caused a stir in the Philippines and provoked the Spanish government to declare them subversive material. Rizal was later exiled to Dapitan, where he customarily broke his fast on “tea, pastry, cheese, sweets, etc.,” as he recounted in a letter to his Austrian friend Ferdinand Blumentritt.
Rizal did not eat his last breakfast; Sta. Maria says this story comes from “Lt. Luis Taviel de Andrada who was Rizal’s defense counsel.” At dawn on Dec. 30, 1896, Wednesday, at Fort Santiago, Rizal was given “a plate with three soft-boiled eggs.” He put the plate in a corner of his cell, saying, “Let the mice have their fiesta, too.”
Rizal then walked with Andrada to the execution grounds at Bagumbayan, where a firing squad took his life, his face upturned to the sky.
Rizal was a curious, intelligent man, and his interest in food and cooking was only one of his many facets that made him the fascinating, intriguing man that we still love to read and speculate about today.
Dr. Ortuoste on Rizal: “Idol ko talaga siya.” FB and Twitter: @DrJennyO