or how to cook a communal dish by yourself
There are Holy Week rituals that feel inescapable, especially if you grow up a Catholic in the Philippines. Hanging palm fronds on the front door on Palm Sunday. Visiting at least seven churches on Maundy Thursday. Joining the Via Crucis on Good Friday. Hunting for eggs on Easter Sunday.
In a week that’s also predicated on “fasting and abstinence” to commemorate a holy death [and resurrection] for the sake of humanity, there’s also one custom I look forward to the most: the traditional Holy Week feast that has come to define the virtues [and allowed indulgences] of the high holy days.
My brother loves the simplicity of champorado, with bulad for taste.
My mother prepares her biko specialty, as if cooking for thousands.
I swear by the dinuldog, what we call this traditional dessert soup that’s also called binignit elsewhere.
I was always grateful for family friends who’d send over a serving or two. I also love how it occupies a special place in Holy Week culinary customs: the holy days meant abstaining from eating meat, so vegetables and fruits become the main cast of ingredients for Lenten meals–and dinuldog is the all-star ensemble. It combines kamote, ube, gabi, and saba bananas, which thicken the soup. The nangka gives it sweet freshness. The sago offers color and chew. The coconut milk ties all the ingredients together.
Before the pandemic, this preparation for Holy Week food had a cadence we partook in, year after year: we’d wake up early on the Saturday before Holy Week, my mother and I going to the tianggue to buy ingredients for our sud-an for the incoming week. The tianggue would be a usual beehive of manangs and manongs hawking their seafood, fruits, and vegetables in spirited negotiation, while those of us buying would counter in a tango of bargaining.
In the first year of the pandemic, things suddenly felt different, even ominous. We felt the now- familiar quiet over the City even growing deeper into the Holy Week. We waited for news from the radio about the Via Crucis route for Good Friday–but none was forthcoming. And because I was the designated shopping scout of the household, I had the sole responsibility of doing tianggue errands by myself.
For some reason, it occurred to me that perhaps it was time to make my own dinuldog. It will be the first dinuldog ever made in my household. My family loved the dish, but no one among us had ever made it.
With that in mind, I headed to the tianggue to buy the ingredients for this small culinary adventure. The usual market bustle was replaced by a sterile kind of quiet. The old atmosphere of busy hawking was replaced by silent transactions, as people lined up in quiet queues. Beneath everyone’s face masks and shields, expressions of nonchalance, although our weary eyes betrayed trepidation.
I bought the root crops, the saba, and the nangka at the fruit stalls, and went about my suki to get the sago and coconut meat. It took a while, and as I went about, I thought there must have a perfect reason why no one in my family ever made dinuldog: my grocery bags were beginning to weigh heavily on my hand, now wrung red from gravity. I wished quickly that mother was there with me to help, and in that quick moment, I felt alone. Pandemics made me emotional.
As soon as I arrived home, I boiled a large pot of water, and put all the ingredients in a colander for washing. I began to peel the kamote and the ube. The gabi, I knew, would go last. I was careful because I knew the sap could cause itchiness. But cutting up the tubers was difficult, and for a moment I felt discouraged.
After cutting the root crops and the fruits, it was time to place them in the boiling pot to soften. I saturated the coconut meat with a little bit of water, and squeezed it a handful at a time into a jug. I was standing for so long my feet almost buckled from under me, and I was ready to give up. My hands were tired.
Mother, who was working from home, and was on her computer, looked quietly at me: “Pasensya, langga. Sorry, I couldn’t help you this time around.” It’s fine, I replied.
She asked if I wore gloves while chopping the gabi. I nodded.
“You know, your Lola once told us never to handle gabi when you’re holding a secret or bad news. If you do, you’ll start to itch,” she said.
I was amused. “When did Lola ever say that?”
“Whenever she made dinuldog.”
My eyebrows shot up my forehead. “Really?”
Mother nodded. She told me she would often help Lola chop ingredients for dinuldog, and she’d always itch all over. “But I wasn’t holding any bad news at all!” she chuckled.
“I didn’t know Lola made dinuldog.”
“She did,” mother said. “Whenever she arrived home from the tianggue, she would tell everybody off because nobody helped her–even though she’d actually bat away anyone who offered to help. She always cooked it during Holy Week, and made a big batch.”
How come I didn’t know this? I felt like mother had just told me a secret.
Mother asked if I wanted to take a break from stirring the boiling soup.
“Thank you, Ma,” I said, smiling. “But I can handle it.”
