In the 2002 film, Kailangan Kita, Claudine Barretto plays Lena, a simple but feisty young lady who spends most of the movie in the kitchen. The film, set in Albay, predictably opens with a view of Mayon, before cutting to clips of cliffside road, a dam, the Legazpi City church, and finally to a large bahay-na-bato where the story takes place.
In the opening scene, Lena prepares a feast, all of the ingredients laid out on blouse on the table. Everyone is bust. Coconuts are brought to the kitchen, steam rises from a wok, an open fire burns in the center of the kitchen stove, and Lena is hurriedly chopping onions. In this house, dehusked corn and garlands of garlic hang from the ceiling while a cornucopia of produce is gloriously displayed on the kitchen table. There are onions, garlic, tomatoes, coconuts, all sorts of greens, and the staple sili, almost jewel-like and featuring prominently in the movie.
A few scenes later, we are greeted with the finished products: pinangat, kinunot, kinilaw, hipon sa gata, laing, and alamang. The film, too, reveals quite a cinematic view of Albayano cuisine, at one point even showing Claudine operating an old-fashioned stone grinder used to milk gata, as well as a kudkuran where she grates coconuts on the blade attached to the tip of a low wooden seat. In all this, Claudine’s traditional cuisine is foil against the fancier palate of Aga Muhlach’s character, celebrity chef Carl.
Food is pivotal in this film, transforming into a language and a symbol for the main protagonists to speak to the audience. Food becomes tantamount to heat, as we often see Lena sweating profusely in the kitchen, but the heat too of her budding romance with Carl. There is heat in the explosive anger of the family patriarch and in the quiet resentment that Lena carries toward her family. Throughout the film, Lena cooks with joy, in anger, and to communicate her love. Food thus also becomes a nexus for the family and, by extension, the community. We are taken through the palengke, where the butcher supplies the pork used in Lena’s Bicol express. We are given a glimpse of the seashore, where a fisherman vends his catch of a ray and a handful of fish.
In Sarap, Doreen Fernandez explores the centrality of our identities in food. I would like now to expound on what this identity means in the context of foodways.
Take the Bicol express. It is a dish that holds a contentious orthographic history. People often, and too quickly relay how the dish was supposedly invented in Metro Manila, and not, as the name implies in Bicol. It was simply, as the story is told, named after the train that used to run from Manila and Legazpi City, Albay.
In Linamnam, Claude Tayag and Mary Ann Quioc expounds this history. In the book, the pair write about regional dishes and food histories all over the Philippines. The chapter on Bicolano cuisine unsurprisingly begins with the “emblematic” Bicol express. Here, they relay how the dish might have originated from Tita Cely Kalaw, hailed restauranteur, at her small karinderya in Malate. They also note that Tita Cely, who hails from Lipa City, Batangas, “grew up in Naga City, where she developed her Bicolano taste buds.” Food identity then becomes fluid. Origin might not always matter more than operative contexts. Matters of “authenticity” typically arise in these conversations of culture, but food especially is not owned in the same way as objects usually are “owned”--that is, with absolute and sole certainty of possession.
December 2025. I hurriedly open a new note in my phone as papa languidly recites what I need to do for cooking Bicol express.
Gisa about six cloves of garlic and one large red onion with little mantika. Once done, pour in most of the gata, saving some for later when it is required. Put in the slices of pork and boil until tender. When the dish is nearing done, pour in the liputok na gata and stir. Add the sili and dinailan. Add more sili seeds as desired.
January 2026. I try recreating the Bicol express with dinailan that I bought online. “Smells about right,” I thought to myself as I opened the vacuum-sealed packaging that the online seller had wrapped it in. Compared to the usual alamang, dinailan is less salty. It is milder and offers none of the grating crunch that I occasionally encounter, having bitten down on the krill in alamang. The problem, however, is that while the palengke where I have, since childhood, memorized by heart where the kudkuran and maggagata is, is so conveniently located in the sentro of Tabaco, here in Manila, I had to settle for the dubious sachets interchangeably labeled “coconut milk” and “coconut cream” in the supermarket. Wanting to be safe, I bought a large sachet of what was labeled “coconut milk” and a medium-sized can of coconut cream – “kakang gata, unang piga,” it declared.
January 2026 (II). Our walking detoured to the Taytay Public Market where we found all the proper ingredients we needed to cook Bicol express. As Doreen Fernandez has also noted in her article in Sarap, there is a, unwritten albeit clear logic to the layout of a Philippine public market that is intrinsically codified in its space. One finds the dry goods outside, mainly in bangketas, then the produce all huddled together. That is outside this section too where one might find the maggagata, with their bucketful of shredded coconut, takal of gata, and the free ikalawang piga right beside it. To the other side of the market, we find the wet section for meats and fish. Pig heads hang like decor on large hooks. Put on display are curtains of ribs accompanied by the occasional pig’s tail and the trotters with knobby joints sticking out the meat.
