" If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?"
-Joyce Carol Oates
Being gifted with a book on New Year's eve is an omen to be taken in good measure. The heavens have hinted that I will be doing a lot of reading this year. So be it. I have a growing library of delicious reads with pages waiting to be devoured. These are mostly books about food and writing about food--the poetry of eating. They were picked from garage sales and second hand bookshops from all over. Some were gifts, and others, impulse acquisitions from the on-line store; still, others more were salvaged from oblivion out of garbage bins.
In past years, work, and I mean work in every sense of the word, led me astray from the orgasmic pleasures of reading. Now, I have the precious gift of time. The seductive words between the sheets are beckoning. Who am I to say no to the kinky possibilities of platonic intercourse. Hello 2006.
What more can titillate the hungry mind than a spanking new copy of Slow Food: Philippine Culinary Traditions. The book is a fiesta of literary concoctions revealing homegrown techniques, expressing the tastes, reminiscing the aromas, and confirming the diversity of real Pinoy gastronomic indulgences. The articles are edited and written by a plethora of who's who in the Filipino artistic and culinary sphere, purveyors of native flavors and regional cooking, and debuting food writers caught by the food bug. The artworthy illustrations are also a treasure to enjoy .
The well-written collection proves that Filipino cooking traditions are not extinct; the ingredients are slowly simmering in the most basic kitchens across the archipelago and beyond. The anthology revels in the affinity of earth, heart, and hearth as a must in cooking good food and it respects the value of ritual and bonding in eating meals from scratch. It reconnects nature and nurture to the palate.
Slow Food:Philippine Culinary Traditions is a must read for aficionados and more for the ignorant whose idea of gastronomic pleasure is to be seduced by golden arches and over-sized androgynous smiling bees flirting in humongous malls and fancy franchised hang-outs that offer everything but flavor and good nutrition. Enough of the over-sized meals and crappy eating habits, the book subtly teaches. Return to the fields and the farms and the dirty kitchens, and pause and remember ever so slowly the ancestors' repast and the tongue shall be rewarded with a taste of history.
Gorge on this book slowly, on food slowly, on love slowly....that nothing ever be endangered , poet Krip Yuson tenderly advises in his blurb.
This I will do.
