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Champorado with tuyo is comfort food. Ginataan is comfort food. It's what you have when you're glum or stressed-out or when Roger Federer is leading Novak Djokovic two sets to love then serving for the match in the fifth set at the US Open semis, and the Djoker somehow slips through. Preferably in a bowl that you can hug as you rock back and forth in fetal position, humming to yourself. Coke and Chippy is Roby's comfort food. Teddy Boy's comfort food is...food (Though he is way fitter these days so he must not need it).
Laing is not comfort food to me; laing is more like a blood transfusion. I will take a plate of shredded gabi (taro) leaves, coconut milk, pork and searing hot chilis over any ten-thousand-dollar ten-course molecular gastronomy showcase served in test tubes any time. (I don’t see why my food has to come out of an autoclave.) Laing is my madeleine out of Proust. I cannot see a tray of laing behind the glass in a turo-turo without becoming eight again. It is my time machine, my childhood, my mom.
Not that we had laing on the menu all the time when I was growing up. Cooking laing was such a huge production number for my mom that we only had it on special occasions, or when she was in a really good mood. For one thing she had ironclad standards governing the ingredients that went into the laing.
1. Gabi leaves
1.1. They had to be the exact age, as in she had to know the time they were plucked, practically. Don’t ask me what that was because I wasn’t paying attention.
1.1.1. I hated going to the market with her because there was so much discussion between my mom and her suking tindera (her regular dealers). Basically she would insult their merchandise and they would insult her spending capability, and then everyone would laugh and she would buy the leaves.
1.1.2. While this was going on I would be reading the John Carter of Mars books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, who also wrote Tarzan of the Apes. The other day I saw the theatrical trailer of the long-planned film adaptation of the John Carter books. It looks bad, and I don’t mean bad as in badass, I mean bad as in “Yucch”.
1.2. Having obtained gabi leaves of the required vintage, she would spread them on a bilao (flat woven tray) and leave them out to dry in the backyard.
1.2.1. "Then why did the gabi leaves have to be of a specific age if she was going to dry them anyway?"
I don't know.
1.2.2. Woe to the sun if it didn't come out. My mother would condemn it as a slacker. Her judgment encompassed all celestial bodies.
1.3. The gabi leaves had to be the right texture or else they would cause your tongue to itch and your throat to close up.
1.3.1. Uro de la Cruz the film director and food anthropologist tells me that in one restaurant critic’s anthology there is a report of a food-related emergency on a commercial airline. After the in-flight meal was served, many of the passengers exhibited symptoms initially thought to be food poisoning. It turned out to be an allergic reaction to eating the taro leaves that were used as decorative accents in the salad.
1.4. When the gabi leaves had attained the required dryness, my mother would shred them very finely. She did all this by hand, being suspicious of kitchen machines.
1.4.1. For this stage of preparation she would call on me to help her shred the gabi leaves. I would protest, being engrossed in the adventures of John Carter and musing on the possibility of teleporting myself to Mars.
1.4.2. My mother would spend the next half-hour railing at my total lack of domestic skills, noting quite rightly that I couldn’t be trusted to cook a pot of rice.
1.4.3. My father would participate in this discussion uninvited, pointing out that other parents had to bribe their kids to take up reading, an activity I engaged in constantly and avidly. This was an ill-fated decision as it led invariably to a debate on their respective philosophies of parenting.
1.4.4. It should be pointed out that it was my mother who bought me the John Carter of Mars books, and the Star Trek novelizations by James Blish, and whatever I happened to be engrossed in at the time.
2. Coconut
2.1. The coconut also had to be of the exact age, which I cannot tell you because I was on Mars at the time. Choosing the right coconut required tapping on the shell and listening to the vibrations like a sound engineer testing the acoustics of a concert hall.
2.2. The small, hairy, brown coconut had to be taken home where it would be split open with a machete and its insides grated on a blade stuck to a kudkuran, essentially a low bench that could castrate the unwitting sitter.
2.3. The grated flesh of the young coconut would then be squeezed by hand, and the milk collected in a beaker. This was the gata.
2.3.1. As my parents were from Bicol where coconuts were the primary economic product, everything my mother cooked contained gata. Our chicken and pork adobo had gata. One must support the local industries.
2.3.1.1. I’ve noticed that some of my friends from Negros, where sugar was the primary product, put five or six heaping teaspoons of sugar in their coffee. Which they drink without stirring their cups.
2.3.1.2. I have a friend who thought coconuts, being brown and hairy, grew under the ground like kamote (sweet potatoes). For my part I thought daing (dried fish) were two-headed fish. City children are stunningly ignorant.
Now I see how Proust could go on and on about those damn madeleines. I've already exceeded my word limit and I haven't even gotten to the chilis or the dish itself. Later.
