What is Filipino cuisine? It's an age-old question with no simple answer. Philippine Cookery: From Heart to Platter skirts the question by simply restating it: how do you cook Filipino? Chef Tatung Sarthou provides the answer, and a whole lot more, through ten fascinating chapters that delve into the flavors, ingredients, techniques that constitute a Philippine-based cuisine.
Rather than classifying this cuisine in nationalist or regional terms, Sarthou uses cooking method as his entry point to understanding, tasting, and recreating the dishes of his home country. He goes deep into Filipino cooks' ways of steaming, grilling, curing, among many techniques. He explores this cuisine's components—vinegar, coconut, rice, etc.
He peppers the book with historical gems, like American’s modernizing influence on pan de sal (salted bread). He also shares his own memories of cooking with his mother and grandmother, including a touching anecdote about how adobo saved his family during World War II.
This book approaches cooking, not as a cold, mechanical guide, but as a process that is much more organic and forgiving, where cooks learn and excel through “feel” and where a recipe is regarded as a “suggestion” more than a rulebook. As the book’s title hints, cooking is truly borne out of love, from which values of honesty, integrity, sense of family, nostalgia play a key role in teaching how to cook Filipino.
Through captivating photographs, recipes, stories, and practical advice, Sarthou takes readers on a journey through time, space, and memory, offering a road map for them to follow to discover their own love for cooking.
