A layered conversation on culinary tradition
LOUIS MISSOURI–I was six or seven the first time I went to heaven.
It was a crunchy, chewy slice of buttercream on meringue on buttercream on meringue sprinkled with crushed cashews, and it came straight out of the freezer. It was decadent but delicate. Like revenge, it was best served cold or better yet, frozen.
Sans rival was a staple during birthdays and holidays–but of course, there’s no stopping anyone from having a slice to go with black coffee for merienda or afternoon snacks. But in our family, sans rival was like lechon and ice cream–it signified a celebration. It meant something special.
After inhaling my first slice of sans rival, I found it hard to kick the habit. I found myself sneaking into the kitchen fridge for a quick fix of what became my all-time favorite dessert.
In a heartbeat, it overthrew biko and brazo de mercedes. It was my Scooby’s snack. Every time I aced an exam, I would proudly present my graded test paper to my parents, in exchange for a slice of sans rival.
Despite being an iconic Dumagueteño pastry, sans rival isn’t ubiquitous in the same way other well-loved sweets, like Tanjay’s budbud, are. There is only one place we, Dumagueteños, get our sans rival, and that’s from the eponymous pastry shop along San Jose Street, just a stone’s throw from Rizal Boulevard.
It was a tiny shop with a blue and white canopy protruding from the entrance, and it was nestled beside a grand house that looked like a pastel wedding cake frosted to perfection.
Inside the shop was Annie, a plump woman with curly hair who stood behind a metal cash register, took our orders, and handed us our slices of sans rival.
For years, this tiny shop, Sans Rival Cakes & Pastries, only had four tables but you know sometimes, there isn’t room in heaven for everyone–until eventually in the early 2000s, the grand house was opened to the public as a cafe and restaurant to accommodate the growing appetite for sans rival, silvanas, and many other tasty things that came out from the heart and kitchen of Trinidad “Trining” Teves-Sagarbarria.
Trining, founder of Sans Rival Cakes & Pastries, was 57 when she opened shop, after finally giving in to nudges from family and friends who became smitten by loaves of sans rival she would serve during gatherings.
It wasn’t long before sans rival, and eventually its cookie version, silvanas, would become synonymous with Trining.
When she pondered on the name for her pastry shop, someone made the clever suggestion of simply naming it after her signature dessert.
Trining did not invent sans rival per se – a recipe for “Cake Sans Rival” appeared in the 19th edition of Enriqueta David-Perez’s Recipes from the Philippines, a widely-circulated cookbook first published in the 1950s.
But it was her adaptation of sans rival that generations of Dumagueteños have come to know, love, and long for.
It became the gold standard against which all other versions of sans rival are measured.
“Where did Abu (endearment for grandmother) learn how to make sans rival?” I asked Chabeli, one of her granddaughters who, like Trining, is a superb baker and pastry chef.
“She came across a sans rival recipe in an old cookbook, but instead of following it to the letter, she asked questions like ‘What if?” and ‘Why not’,” Chabeli replied.
Before being a home cook, Trining was an artist, and innovator at heart. Much of her joy in the kitchen stemmed from reinventing age-old recipes to create something new.
Bon Appetit Food Director Chris Morocco calls this “recipe riffing”, which lies at the heart of recipe development–when cooks interpreted and drew inspiration from existing recipes but were not beholden to them.
Family stories recount how Trining endlessly tweaked and transformed the original sans rival recipe until it evolved into sans rival à la Trining.
To this day, it remains a mystery how many iterations she went through as she experimented with the cake’s shape, ingredient proportions, and flavor harmony.
Like any great inventor, she was unrelenting in her quest for the perfect loaf. Like any true artist, she understood the frame of reference, and then had fun with it.
Trining embarked on the same creative process with two of her other famous desserts, silvanas and josephines. The original silvanas recipe she encountered shaped the cookie into a mound, which she found difficult to bite into. She transformed it into a flat, cookie-like disc — its most recognizable form today. A practical innovation that would give silvanas it’s most recognizable look.
Josephines were born from Trining’s desire to make napoleones smaller and easier to snack on. Napoleones are layered, flaky puff pastries filled with creamy custard, and topped with a sweet glaze—smaller versions of the original Napoleon Cake. This popular Russian pastry was created to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Russia’s victory over Napoleon Bonaparte.
The pocket-sized napoleones of Bacolod fame is a mille-feuille with the same layered, flaky, and puffy texture. For her version, Trining used velvety vanilla custard, and reduced the size of the pastry to roughly half, making them more convenient and delightful to eat, and named her new creation after the first wife of Napoleon, Joséphine de Beauharnais.
In her culinary covers, Trining showed how traditions can both be preserved and transformed. After all, who is to say what a dish should strictly be? Her unique takes on sans rival, silvanas, and josephines make these desserts no less authentic then their culinary progenitors.
Yet, the transformation of food also rests in the hands and mouths of those who consume it. Consumers provide a sense of validation and affirmation through their enjoyment and appreciation, encouraging culinary creators to explore, innovate, and push the boundaries of existing traditions to reflect changing tastes and circumstances.
French politician and gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s famous words in Physiologie du goût (Physiology of Taste), “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are,” capture an essential truth about the relationship between food and identity.
Brillat-Savarin’s statement only tells half the story. The dynamic interaction between food creators and consumers fosters an ever-evolving culinary ecosystem where what we eat is shaped by who we are, just as much as who we are is shaped by what we eat.
Food is not just sustenance; it is a reflection of cultural heritage, personal preferences, and social influences. The choices we make in our meals, whether traditional or innovative, speak volumes about our backgrounds, values, and experiences.
Conversely, our culinary experiences and exposures shape our tastes, preferences, and even our sense of identity.
As food and culinary traditions travel and change hands, they evolve, sometimes incrementally, and other times, so drastically that they are reborn as something entirely different, and unrecognizable from their original state.
Sans rival may be considered a classic dessert in the Philippines, and among Filipino diaspora communities, but its origins remain shrouded in mystery. Despite its widespread popularity, its culinary genealogy is not well-documented, leaving food historians and enthusiasts to speculate about its past.
Some believe that sans rival, with its layers of buttery meringue and rich buttercream, was inspired and influenced by French pastry traditions introduced to the Philippines and to Filipinos in Europe, directly or indirectly, during the colonial period.
Sans rival is frequently likened to two renowned French pastries: the dacquoise and the marjolaine, which share nearly identical ingredients and techniques with sans rival.
The dacquoise, tracing its origins to the 17th or 18th century, literally refers to a woman who lives in the town of Dax, a commune in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, southwestern France.
This delicate, usually round cake is characterized by its layers of almond or hazelnut meringue and buttercream, similar to the composition of sans rival. Because almonds and hazelnuts were scarce in the Philippines, cashew nuts were seen as the most suitable substitutes as way of still achieving the base recipe’s nutty crunch.
It is no wonder that in some Western recipe books, the same pastry using cashew nuts goes by the name Cashew Dacquoise rather than sans rival.
But dacquoise isn’t a standalone cake. It’s a shape shifter of sorts. It’s akin to a canvas in the pastry world, serving as a versatile base for various desserts such as macarons, pavlovas, marjolaine, and yes, sans rival, which are often categorized as types of dacquoise.
Its adaptability makes it a favorite among pastry chefs, allowing them to experiment with different nut flours like pistachio or almond, as well as incorporating diverse dried fruits or chocolate to craft unique flavor profiles.
Like the English language, dacquoise has undergone countless local adaptations, many of which may remain unrecorded, and all of them still undoubtedly from the same culinary parentage.
In its cake form, the buttercream filling in dacquoise is often spread or piped evenly between the meringue layers, resulting in a more rustic and chunky filling compared to the smooth and refined appearance of sans rival when sliced.
In terms of shape, the marjolaine more closely resembles the classic sans rival loaf, although in terms of its flavor profile, it appears closer to a chocolate dacquoise.
Literally meaning ‘sweet marjoram’ despite having no trace of it in the pastry, the marjolaine is a rectangular cake credited to the esteemed Nouvelle Cuisine chef Fernand Point.
Renowned for his culinary prowess at the iconic Restaurant De La Pyramide in Vienne, France since the 1920s, Point introduced this dessert, which was one of the 200 recipes included in Ma Gastronomie, a posthumous publication of the iconic dishes that he invented and prepared.
Marjolaine shares a similar level of complexity and composition with dacquoise and sans rival. Like the other two pastries, it consists of layers of nut meringue and buttercream.
However, marjolaine sets itself apart by incorporating chocolate or coffee flavors, along with additional elements such as praline and ganache, which are absent from classic renditions of dacquoise and sans rival. These additions elevate the taste profile, adding a richness and indulgence that distinguish marjolaine from its counterparts.
Another confection that sans rival has been compared to is a cake called the torta imperial rusa or Russian Imperial Cake, its origin just as mysterious as the sans rival.
While some sources claim that the Torta Imperial Rusa was created in the 1900s by an Italian pastry chef in Argentina who named his creation in honor of the Romanovs, other sources insist that this rectangular cake made of French buttercream, meringue, and almonds was invented in the Russian Imperial Court around the same time.
A columnist in a national newspaper speculated in 2009 that sans rival could have been a local spin-off of the torta imperial rusa which made it to the Philippines through Spain sometime in the 1940s, through a chef and restaurateur in Cadiz who shared the recipe to a Filipino family.
If there is one thing sources agree on, it’s that the torta imperial rusa is of dacquoise parentage–it is basically made of buttercream, meringue, and nuts. Like sans rival and marjolaine, it differed in the addition or omission of other ingredients, and to some degree, in terms of the presentation.
Assuming it came from the Russian imperial court, its French DNA effortlessly shines through.
This comes as no surprise, given how the Russian imperial court embraced French protocol and culinary traditions since the reign of Catherine the Great who spearheaded the massive transformation of the Russian imperial court so that it rivaled the grandeur and sophistication of other European courts, particularly the French court, which was the era’s tastemaker and trendsetter.
French chefs such as Marie-Antoine Carême who served as head chef during the reign of Tsar Alexander I and Jean Pierre Cubat who succeeded him as head chef in the courts of Tsars Alexander II, Alexander III, and Nicholas II, ruled the imperial kitchen. They were supported by a team of Russian and European sous-chefs who had been trained in the finest French culinary schools.
Given the imperial court’s extensive adoption of French court and culinary traditions, it is possible that new pastries would emerge from the imperial confectionery, crafted in the style and tradition of French patisserie or that classic pastries such as the dacquoise would be reinvented, and given a new name.
A Spanish adaptation of the beloved imperial pastry is entirely plausible, given the international nature of the imperial kitchen. As people traveled, they carried with them both tangible and intangible cultural elements, such as food and recipes.
These culinary traditions were often tweaked and transformed, resulting in creations that bore a resemblance to the originals, but also emerged as entirely new creations. This dynamic process of cultural exchange and adaptation does not only highlight how recipes can evolve but also how they are spread.
In the case of sans rival, or whatever name its foreign counterparts bore, the dessert could have traveled to the archipelago through various routes.
Directly, it may have come via Filipinos and Frenchmen who visited each other’s countries since the colonial period, bringing with them elements of their culture that inevitably went through adaptation as they settled in new environments, subtly changing to survive and thrive.
Indirectly, French dishes reached the Philippines through the sieve of colonization, through Spain and the United States, which had strong historical and cultural ties with France.
Several Spanish adaptations of French recipes emerged especially in the 18th century as the Bourbons brought French culture to Spain.
America’s equally intertwined history with France also resulted in the adoption and adaptation of French recipes that would make it into American cookbooks, which became widespread through Domestic Sciences courses that were part of the American public school system in the country during the American occupation, as well as through bookstores and magazine shops.
Sometimes, these recipes retained their original names, remaining recognizable as petit choux or pitisu, filet mignon, and other familiar terms. Other times, they adopted new names and flavors, from croquettes to croquetas, pot-au-feu to cocido parisien, or sauce hollandaise to salsa holandesa.
Upon reaching the kitchens of Filipino chefs and home cooks, these recipes underwent yet another round of adaptation and transformation, blending with local culinary traditions and ingredients to create uniquely Filipino versions of these classic dishes.
In her essay Beyond Sans Rival: French Influence on Philippine Gastronomy, Filipino food writer Doreen Gamboa Fernandez wrote that she believes that French influence solely manifests in more abstract aspects of Philippine culture such as lifestyle and ideals rather than through more tangible things like food.
In the same essay, Fernandez noted the absence of sans rival in several cookbooks published and distributed during the colonial period. These included Repostería Francesca at Española (1919): Aclat na ganap na naglalaman ng maraming paglacad at pag-gaûa ng lahat ng mga bagay-bagay na matatamis at mga pasteles” (French and Spanish Pastries and Confectioneries) by P.R. Macosta, translated into Tagalog by Crispulo Trinidad, as well as the more widely distributed Everyday Cookery for the Home: Choice Recipes for All Tastes and All Occasions (1930) by Sofia Reyes de Veyre and Maria Paz Zamora Mascuñana. Fernandez concluded that “No French dishes can be said to have become part of, adapted, and indigenized into our cuisine, as have paella, morcon, relleno, puchero; and lumpia, siomai, camaron rebozado; and hamburgers, hotdogs, and sandwiches.”
However, while the name ‘sans rival’ may not appear in the cookbooks she mentioned, there is no denying that the ingredients and techniques associated with French patisserie found their way into Filipino kitchens.
The use of meringue, buttercream, and the layering techniques seen in sans rival suggest an influence that, while not explicitly documented in early Filipino cookbooks, was nonetheless present and evolving.
This subtle incorporation of French culinary methods into Filipino desserts reflects a broader pattern of adaptation, innovation, and even localization, where traditional recipes are continually reinterpreted, transformed, and assume certain characteristics of their new home.
Tracing the culinary genealogy of sans rival is as complex and winding as uncovering a person’s ancestral roots.
Ultimately, we can only follow the available information so far, before the path becomes obscure and vanishes into the mists of history.
While we can connect the dots and fill in the blanks with informed speculations, we are often left with more questions than answers.
But does the precise provenance of sans rival or any other dish really matter? I think not.
Although it may be fascinating and amusing to trace our origins, what matters more is what’s in front of us. What matters more is the awareness and acceptance that, like many Filipino dishes—sans rival included—what we have is no less authentic, no less delightful than the originals they were inspired from.
It is true with food as it is with people. As we travel and interact with others, we adapt and evolve while still retaining the vestiges of where we came from.
In many ways, we are like dacquoise, a versatile base from which other unique confections are built.
As dacquoise traveled with the people who carried its recipe, it adapted to new environments while retaining its core essence. This adaptability allowed it to evolve into desserts like marjolaine, macarons, and sans rival, each with its own distinct identity, yet, still recognizable in its roots.
As dacquoise changed hands and kitchens across borders and cultures, it underwent a process of localization and indigenization.
In the Philippines, we know it best as sans rival, distinct through the use of local ingredients such as cashews instead of the traditional almonds or hazelnuts.
This adaptation not only made the dessert more accessible and affordable but also added a unique Filipino twist, making it a beloved local treat.
This culinary evolution mirrors how we adapt to new places. When we migrate or interact with different cultures, we carry with us our traditions, values, and customs.
As we settle into our new environments, we attempt to blend our heritage with local practices, creating a hybrid identity that is both familiar and novel. This process of adaptation is not about losing one’s origins but about enriching them with new experiences and perspectives.
Our cultural heritage is our dacquoise–it provides a base upon which we build our identities. We incorporate elements from different cultures, experiences, and interactions, transforming ourselves in the process. Each layer of our lives, much like the meringue and buttercream in sans rival, adds depth, complexity, and richness to our identities.
This continuous evolution also reflects the dynamism of Filipino cuisine. Dishes like sans rival are not just about preserving tradition but about embracing change and innovation. They are about creating something new, and delightful by riffing from familiar ingredients and techniques. This process of adaptation and reinvention ensures that our culinary traditions remain vibrant and relevant.
Ultimately, the significance of sans rival, and indeed any dish, lies not in its exact provenance but in its capacity to bring joy, foster connection, and tell a story of cultural fusion.
By celebrating our unique interpretations and honoring the rich tapestry of influences that shape us, we acknowledge the shared human experience embedded in every bite.
Sans rival is Filipino, but it is in many ways also French. The layers of meringue and buttercream that are characteristic of this dessert draw directly from classic French dacquoise patisserie techniques. These culinary traditions, meticulously developed in French kitchens, bring a touch of sophistication and elegance to the dessert.
However, the adaptation of these techniques and ingredients to local tastes and resources is what makes sans rival uniquely Filipino.
Yet, beyond the practical substitution of ingredients, what makes sans rival a Filipino confection is its place in the Filipino table. It is a dessert that has become a staple at celebrations, from birthdays to holidays, embodying the Filipino spirit of festivity and communal joy.
The way it is shared and savored among families and friends speaks to the heart of Filipino hospitality, and the importance of togetherness and belonging.
Sans rival’s mestizo or mixed identity as both Filipino and French is a testament to the fluidity of cultural exchange. It reflects how culinary traditions can transcend borders, carrying with them the essence of their origins while evolving to resonate with new audiences.
This blend of French sophistication and Filipino warmth creates a dessert that is rich in both flavor and history, symbolizing the harmony that can arise from cultural fusion.
In this way, sans rival is a delicious reminder of our interconnectedness, of how we can honor our heritage while embracing new influences, creating something that is greater than the sum of its parts.
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Author’s email: [email protected]
