Since REVOLUTIONARY falls cliché when "world-class and one-global village," "ingenious culinary arts" "radical cuisine" and "sublime culture, ethnic, folk-pitfalls, pamangang bale" are a handful a myriad, as one Pinoy old timer is short of to resist the temptation of applying modern strategies in promoting Filipino culture and cuisine outside our brown soils, Reynaldo G. Alejandro succeeds.
With two latest books to mark, The Adobo Book and Wow! Ang Sarap (read next issue of MB Taste) Alejandro reaffirms the inevitable evolution of local cuisine—in all its regional diversity—and pokes a global audience with the tangs and tastes of south-eastern awe. The Brown Revolution, as how the local cultural community puts it, and revolution is a statement that the Filipino can do it, puts in active demeanour all that Alejandro has been working on since he left the country.
THE ADOBO BOOK
One can only welcome with both excitement and trepidation the gastronomic contours of the Adobo Book Traditional and Jazzed-Up Recipes. The emerging culinary landscapes of the traditional and modern—notwithstanding the comparative availability of ingredients since the 1700s up to this generation—are put in text-based kitchen testing, representing taste-subjectivities in all social levels.
Published by Anvil Publishing Inc., and with co-author Nancy Lumen from the bloodline of Engracia Reyes, Reynaldo Alejandro waylays a traditional coffee table recipe book, and features strict Adobo cooking inimical to modern experimental cuisine.
One can only marvel on its accessibility—minimal of photographic leeway and literary delusions—the Adobo Book will simply entail one, a day to finish reading from cover to cover, but a lifetime of enjoyment to cook all the recipes. Or will the new Adobo generation further the science into art, undermine and/or ultimately banalize gastronomic consciousness? Will one prefer rosemary or basil in exchange to laurel, white wine in exchange to sukang tuba or paombong, etc.?
Reynaldo, in reciprocating all dinner invitations, had to introduce Filipino food to his foreign friends and colleagues. A self-taught cook on Pinoy victuals, he learned cooking by reading various cookbooks and corresponding with his grandmother in the Philippines for their ancestral recipes.
From here on Philippine food preparation was about to take on a new dimension. Reynaldo’s culinary performances and tablescapes, as he calls them, have become hallmarks in grand banquet settings. He had done culinary performances in Europe, Americas and Asia.
Craig Claiborne, former restaurant critic of the New York Times in a featured article on Filipino food wrote "Alejandro is a young man of many talents… an excellent and dedicated cook, the soul of hospitality." Washington Post’s food editor Phyllis Richman gave out good words for him, as well.
Alejandro authored voluminous types of books, all for the grandiose of Philippine cuisine and culture. As one of the greatest Filipinos of his generation, Center for Asian Culinary President, Gene Gonzalez says "Ronnie is the Paciano of our current cultural revolution," for some Alejandro is simply a great Pinoy who never really left home.
Coming more immediate are the personality-based adobo recipes that open a wayrail of different cooking modes. Essays of familiar gastropologists like Milagros Enriquez, Mama Sita, Gene Gonzalez, and Ado Escudero play reflective on the scarcity of ingredients during the time of the revolution until the offset of the 80s.
For recipes, one can feast on Don Anastacio De Alba’s version Adobo with prawns and crabs—contrast to Angel Lontoc Cruz’s Sawsawang Adobong Gata for Inihaw na Sugpo—contrast to Gonzalez’s Adobo de Tsino with exquisite oriental character but not putting in rundown Pinoy sensibilities—and contrast to adobadong frog legs by Bernie Tapiador, and Carmel Dael’s Adobong Tuyo—and so on, and so on.
Reading the Adobo book puts us in splendorous pride of being Pinoy—reflecting our comfort dish in all its facets. Absorbing the Adobo Book—in its humble beauty, simplistic or otherwise, pangmasa—the realization of what Alejandro does above all else is address the nationalistic gnaw in all of us. This is a consideration lamentably absent in other cookbooks.
Alejandro’s Adobo Book—in rationalization as how it manipulates readers by not really manipulating them—is not really about Adobo, but of the simple fact of the current Filipino perspective, reflective of a social mindset and taste preferences. In short, the Adobo dish/recipe becomes an amalgam to define our differences as one Filipino.
DABBLED SERENDIPITY
As the first Pinoy graduate of the New York’s Restaurant School in the United States, Alejandro had submitted a thesis proposal on how to open a Filipino restaurant. Virtually, investors heard about it and asked him to put his thesis into operation. And so, Washington became his laboratory.
Putting his craft in self-reclusion before the turbulent years of the Martial Law era, back in 1969, Alejandro searched for the "significant human experience" in turn, honing all that’s Filipino in him—food, dance, music, liberal arts and history—spilling the rational point that he was tailing a meaningful career in NewYork.
"You become more Filipino when you are away from the country of birth," he said. By that, one can always say that Alejandro never really left home.
With a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Ateneo de Manila University and a Master’s degree in Library Science from the University of the Philippines, Alejandro took on a research librarian position for 18 years at the New York Public Library, the best place to toil a self-research on Philippine cuisine, and a grand table to present all its colors and tastes.
Allowing him an opportunity to pore over materials on the Philippines, gave focus to his nationalistic ardor, building a modest but impressive Filipiniana collection. His stint and perseverance, earned him a post at the Foreign Language Library and Dance Collection of the New York Public Library, at Lincoln Center, and as Curator of the Culinary Collection. Dance and cuisine were a perfect mix.
