Grande Cuisine in the Philippines

At the Oxford Symposium in 2000, Food and the Memory, two food historians from the Philippines, Doreen Fernandez and Ambeth Ocampo, described aspects of the culinary creativity of the now-vanished city of Sulipan, beyond the northern shore of the Bay of Manila, where the delta of the Rio Grande meets the sea. Memories have been preserved by the life’s work of one man in particular, Gene Gonzalez. Doreen Fernandez sketches in the outlines of the style, where influences from France, Spain, Malaya, China and the South Seas created a potent mixture. Ambeth Ocampo concentrates on a single event, a piece of historical reconstruction that celebrated the launch of the first independent republic of the Philippines at the constitutional convention of Malolos. This occurred after the defeat of the Spanish by the American fleet in Manila Bay in 1898. The Americans, however, were unwilling to cede control to native Filipinos, under the leadership of Emilio Aguinaldo, who attempted to go it alone. The republic was short-lived.