The first time Jill Damatac made adobo, when she was 26, she boiled the meat for two and a half hours, until it was purged of moisture, purpose and soul. The meager pinches of ginger and garlic that went into the pot came desiccated, in jars. What wound up on the plate was “a salty recollection of sauce,” she writes in her memoir, “Dirty Kitchen.”
She did not know how to make adobo, or any Filipino dish for that matter. She had stopped eating the food of her childhood and of her ancestors — had almost stopped being Filipino, “as a form of survival,” she writes. She was trying to be wholly American, to hide her secret: that although she had lived in the United States since she was 9, alighting in Newark after a journey of 30 hours and three planes, her family was never able to obtain official papers; that she was undocumented.
Like many children of immigrants, she had to find her way back to her heritage, to approach it almost as an outsider. She turned to old cookbooks and trawled the comments section of Panlasang Pinoy, an online trove of Filipino recipes. The more she researched, the more curious she became about older, precolonial traditions, particularly among her father’s people, the highland Ifugao of the Cordillera region of Luzon. So often, she told me, these were sensationalized as exotic relics and “noble savage stuff.”
You could call it a chicken soup, but understand that this is a merely literal description. Pinikpikan “is not primarily cooked for pleasure,” Damatac writes. “It is eaten as the final part of a holy ceremony, which must appease the gods and offer compensation to a displeased universe.” When a member of the family falls ill, the mumbaki comes. To cook is to cure.
If you are tender of heart, you may prefer to skip to the next paragraph. For in this ritual, there is no veil between life and death. The root of “pinikpikan” is “pik-pik,” “to beat,” and historically the people who eat the dish must first stand witness as the chicken, the required sacrifice, is struck with a stick — softly, according to accounts, if that is of any comfort — to make the blood rise under the skin. Damatac writes about this forthrightly. This is who we were, she says: “We need to be seen throughout all our incarnations in time.” (Today the practice is banned under the country’s Animal Welfare Act.)
If you cannot find a traditional healer, there is another form of medicine: tinola, a chicken soup that is more earthbound, perhaps, but no less restorative. It rewards patience, as its subtle flavor “does not bloom, soft and gentle on the tongue, until the second mouthful,” Damatac writes. There are echoes of pinikpikan in its profusion of ginger, bringing a sweet heat; peppery malunggay (moringa) leaves in their mysterious fractals; chayote, kin to squash but as bracing as an apple, for a clean, juicy bite. Patis (fish sauce) stands in for salt.
Damatac, who chose to self-deport in 2015 and is now, at age 42, a British citizen, recalls how her lola (grandmother) made tinola, with the whole chicken, in a “chuck everything in the pot and deal with it” way. In her own version, she uses just thighs and drumsticks, with skin and on the bone, and bronzes them before submerging them in chicken stock and setting to a simmer. (For only 20 minutes: She has learned her lesson.)
One part of her heritage that she never lost: her love of chicken skin. She buys extra from the butcher and crisps it, starting the pan cold and letting the heat rise, watching as the fat melts and sputters. She serves it with the tinola, adding it as a topping at the last possible moment, so it won’t soften and sink in the broth. She likes the shatter, the dark shards of gold between her teeth.
It comes with a touch of déjà vu, as she writes about adobo in her book: “as if you have had it before, in a past life, when you were loved and well fed.”
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