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Far from our barrios, mountains, and islands, we cook, so that we may practice swallowing our undesirable truths, acidic and blood-heavy.
Tinola
(Ginger-Chicken Soup)
Serves 4
1 kg skin-on, bone-in chicken thighs
Optional: chicken feet, neck, heart, liver, gizzard
1 sayote, peeled, seeded, cubed
1 cup malunggay leaves
5 garlic cloves, smashed
3 x 5 cm pieces peeled ginger, sliced into matchsticks
1 red onion, diced
8 cups unsalted chicken stock
Patis to season
Tinola is humble. It does not capture foodie attention through its looks, which are pale and watery, or its scent, which is gingery boiled chicken, or its flavor, which does not bloom, soft and gentle on the tongue, until the second mouthful.
When I was little, before I departed the sunny, Pacific chaos of our world for the chilly, Atlantic silence of the new world, we often had tinola for Sunday lunch at Lolo and Lola’s house, where I would spend weekends. In the early mornings, Lolo and I would stroll the barrio streets to buy fresh pandesal from the local bakery, me skipping along in mumbled song with the roosters, him punching the air with calisthenic fists, just as he had done with the American GIs during the war.
In Pennsylvania, where he had followed us a year after we left, he would walk me to and from school, the two of us passing a bag of sticky, sour sampalok between us, spitting out the smooth, shiny seeds into our palms. He always wore his pristinely white Reeboks and sometimes his ten-gallon cowboy hat. I still remember my shame on the days he would arrive in that hat.
It was during those early years in the land of the free and the home of the brave that I first felt shame, which is a hunger for pride, and loneliness, which is a hunger for belonging. Tinola’s plain, clear-brothed, ginger-laced embrace helped to sate these hungers, my tongue swallowing the taste of home soil.
Sauté the garlic, ginger, and onion in oil in a large pot, stirring until soft.
Lola Rosing kept a malunggay tree in her front yard, bushy and narrow, fed by the morning Manila sun. Whenever she made tinola, she had me pick fresh from the tree, reminding me to choose only the sweet young branches.
Malunggay is a lot of work: its fronds are galaxies of individual leaves shooting out from the parent branch and into eternity. In the dirty kitchen—where the real cooking happens in Filipino houses—we plucked leaves until she was satisfied with the size of the dark green pile. With a wordless smile, she gave me permission to play outside.