By the tongue: (Mis)adventures in food substitution

For me, and I have no doubt you would agree, it’s our untameable cravings that often lead us by the tongue to find the right ingredient, no matter what lengths we take—some reasonable, like crossing by subway or the slower bus ride the length of Manhattan from the West to get to Chinatown in the East for two bundles of bak choy (pechay); others quite ridiculous, as when a seatmate on a flight from Honolulu hand-carried what she complained felt like steel bars —packs of frozen steamed saluyot leaves and babao. 

Add to that, the risks to which we bare ourselves when we misuse revered food ingredients and twist them to our native taste, as in how Janice, our guest for a holiday dinner, sort of paused on the tinola soup, as she held back what must have been her disdain, when told the creamy cubes were zucchini (in the absence of sayote or green papaya), and the islands of green leaves, hardy spinach (in place of pepper leaves); what had flashed in her mind must have been her famed banana walnut with zucchini bread and her spinach lasagna, apparently the uses of both by the books.

At a recent small gathering of kababayans in our neighborhood, a plate of greenish fresh fruit, looking crispy, and hinting at mouth-pinching acidity, drew me on impulse to take a wedge and soak it in the dip dish of dark Iluko vinegar. Midway through my obvious greed, I noticed it had a smooth skin, no seeds, and even if slightly sour, lacked the pungency, which clinches the thrill of eating guavas raw. I asked Delle, our weekend host—caregiver-turned-budding chef—where she got what might be a “guapple” that I have not seen in produce stores lately; she laughed, saying, “Hindi, ate! Banjo per ’yan!” D’Anjou pear, that is.

How easy, indeed, to pass off this oblongish green-pear variety, not as the big Thai apple-grafted variety, but our hard-to-find bayabas-kalabaw. I had sighed in relief that mercifully, Doris, who, like most Canadians, demurred all her life from exotic food, did not take my extended invitation to come with us, imagining even now how she would have veiled a raised eyebrow; apparently brought to North America from France, the pear has long been prized for its consistency, not only as out-of-hand snack, but also the zing in salads if stripped, but especially when pureed into a dipping sauce.

In truth, Delle does not have to substitute her ingredients; today Asians compose most Vancouverites so much so that we hardly miss a heartbeat to find all varieties of bak choy, pepper and yam leaves, all sizes of eggplant, okra, bitter melon and even sui choy (patola) as well as meat parts and cuts, say, for higado.

It’s in Northeastern cities where substituting ingredients while challenging could yield novel tastes; at a birthday feast in Austin, Texas, for instance, the entrée of kare-kare with stemmed broccoli and Baguio beans, and not of oxtail but simply the meaty cuts of beef neck bones, tasted just as savory, though milder. Unbelievably so, but true—in Manhattan, none of the cabbage varieties for salads would be right for picadillo but, hey, some packs already julienned for coleslaw, so convenient to toss into the boiling sauteed ground beef, even enriches the flavor.

Still, our cravings could end up among hilarious legends we love to pass around like my yet-unsated pining for my father’s pochero; I have settled since for Wiener hotdogs in place of non-existent chorizos de Bilbao, but none in the many shelves of pricey Canadian packs looks and smells close to a smoked leg of ham a la Ongpin. Recent displays on supermarket islands sparked some hope, though—but if I didn’t examine what I had thought seemed quite right, my pochero would have been flavored by a dog chew bone.