There’s a specific line of questioning that Filipinos tend to get.
“Do you love basketball?” “What about Rodrigo Duterte?” “Does your dad eat dogs?” And, most importantly, “Does your mom make pancit?”
The answers are typically, “Yes.” “I don’t, but my crazy tito does.” “Dad says he has.” And, “Yes, my mama makes pancit.”
Food, like in so many other cultures, is integral to the Filipino experience. Even the diets of the poorest of the poor in the Philippines — and there’s poverty everywhere — revolve around certain plates. For the privileged many, however, the table is laced with food the same way the former First Lady Imelda Marcos’s closet was lined with shoes. Whether that table is kamayan (a traditional Filipino way of eating sans utensils) or regular (you know, how white people eat, with spoons and forks), noodles like pancit are present.
There are generally three varieties of pancit. There’s canton (similar to lo mein), bihon (let’s call it stir-fry) and bam-i (a cross between canton and another Filipino noodle dish called sotanghon).
One pancit prep often overlooked by non-Filipinos — and revered by your best caucasian friend who only dates Filipinos — is palabok. The classic seafood pasta has an orange to red hue and has become popular enough to be a menu item at Jollibee, the Filipino chain of fast-food restaurants that’s expanded to the U.S., Southeast Asia, the Middle East and even Italy. Palabok is an acquired taste, but isn’t the strangest Filipino pasta dish (that distinction belongs to Filipino spaghetti, which features a sugary, beef-based red sauce, red-colored hot dogs and a melty, processed cheese topping).
In the motherland, palabok is garnished with tinapa, a smoked or preserved fish similar to anchovies. Patis, a Filipino sauce made with fermented fish, can be sprinkled in for saltiness. The palabok itself also has a specific odor thanks to its base proteins — shrimp, clams, mussels and squid. Fried tofu is mixed in to take the edge off. A whiff of that oceanic aroma takes many Filipinos back to childhood.
“Palabok is a treat. Sometimes we ordered it, but my sisters would help Mama Diding make it when we didn’t have maids.”
That’s my mother, Rita Roa, explaining her relationship with the dish. She’s one of 10 children, and Mama Diding is her mom. Pretty much everybody in the Philippines has a maid; remember, this is a country so poor that the help has help. She’s been eating palabok since elementary school, but she didn’t start cooking it until the mid-1980s when she moved to the U.S. so that her kids could have a better life.
“It just reminded me of home,” she says.
Rita obliged a request to make a big pan of palabok for CL’s Food Issue. Seeing her inside a small kitchen, pivoting between the counter and a hot stovetop, is reminiscent of my own childhood; if the palabok gets served in a flimsy aluminum pan, then I might think I’m at a birthday party.
The Mama Sita’s brand “Special Pancit Palabok” packet is a totally acceptable way to make the dish, but any self-respecting Filipino mom knows how to make a pan from scratch. The labor-intensive process involves chopping and sauteeing mollusks. Shrimp must go from gray to the perfect shade of pink, then be peeled before the heads, tails and legs get malleted so that the jus is added to the sauce for extra flavor. Palabok’s color comes by way of achuete powder extracted from aromatic annatto seeds. An additional orange tint is occasionally made possible with cooked blue crab fat. Garlic, scallions and baby onion are diced, too. All of it — with lots of black pepper — goes into a large caldero that might be older than you are. The sauce eventually bubbles and starts to reduce.
In the meantime, you wait and prep some more. Hard-boiled eggs, traditional palabok garnish, get peeled and set aside. Pork rinds are pulverized by hand for the same purpose. Rita asks you why you don’t go to church anymore, but then you remind her that the noodles — a pack of Super Q brand “Special Palabok Cornstarch Sticks” — needed to go into that boiling pot of water five minutes ago.
Eventually, the noodz are ready to go into Corning Ware, where they’re folded into the chunky sauce. Mom puts the eggs into the dollar-store egg slicer, wedges them and corrals that ramekin of crushed chicharones. It comes together the same way it always has. The dish is admired for a moment before it’s plated onto oh-so-familar white budget china. Rita slices lemons and reminds you calamansi, the Filipino citrofortunella that’s likely a hybrid of kumquat and mandarin orange, is what she’d really like to be squeezing into the bowl. The citrus zest further awakens your senses, and then Mom makes you pray before eating.
It’s like being a kid again. Slurping through a few servings is satisfying and nostalgic, except this time you’re going back to your own home and the new set of circumstances that adult life has afforded you. Feeling full, and fat, on the way home is kind of a bummer — but a traffic light turns red and you check a fresh text from Mom written in the mixed-speak she’s always used.
“Hi Doy naminggaw lang ko,” aka “Hi, son, I’m just missing you.”
The text also says cooking with you reminds her of when you and your siblings lived under the same roof.
“Hope we can do these again with Robert and Risha,” it reads, ignoring grammar and the fact that your little brother now lives 940 miles away from where you and your only sister grew up. “You hv a good afternoon takecare.”
Take care? You just took care of me, Ma. You always have, whether there was palabok or not.
