What did Filipinos consume throughout colonial times? What ingredients did they cook dinner with? How did they adapt dishes that came from other shorelines? These are just some of the questions that Felice Prudente Sta. Maria has spent much of her career thinking about and learning to give you answers.
A UP graduate, author, cultural heritage advisor, culinary historian, Sta. Maria has been at the forefront of cultural paintings in the Philippines because she published her award-winning e-book Heirlooms and Antiques in 1980. She has headed the Metropolitan Museum of the Philippines, served as a Commissioner on the National Commission for Culture and the Arts and the UNESCO National Commission of the Philippines, and presently sits on the Ayala Museum Board of Advisors and serves as a trustee of the Philippine National Museum.
While she has written about many elements of Philippine tradition, she has been leading the way with her meticulous studies on culinary history, especially. Collecting antique cookbooks and recipes, poring over colonial-generation chronicles through Spanish writers, and cross-checking these with authoritative resources and facts, Sta. Maria is adamant about properly grounding her findings with well-documented proof.
The effects of her culinary research include award-winning books like The Governor-General’s Kitchen: Philippine Culinary Vignettes and Period Recipes, 1521-1935, The Foods of Jose Rizal, Coconut Champion: Franklin Baker Company of the Philippines (which also placed second in the Corporate History Category of Gourmand World Cook Book Awards 2017), and the list is going on.
For the historian Sta. Maria, studies by no means end, with two new books due to be posted inside the next few months—When Mangoes and Olives Met: A Brief Introduction to the Colonial in Philippine Cuisine, 1515-1946, and Kain Na: An Illustrated Guide to Popular Philippine Cuisine, co-authored with Bryan Koh. She is likewise finalizing research on what is going to be the primary lexicon of Philippine colonial-generation culinary phrases (primarily based on period dictionaries from 1609 to 1907), in addition to Eating Our Words, a sampling of culinary phrases from Spanish colonial word lists, dictionaries, and recipe books.
While Sta. Maria is busy learning the beyond; she additionally keeps the refreshingly present day. An avid Facebook user, she serves as a judge with the Doreen Gamboa Fernandez Food Writing Awards, profitable and cultivating writers, whether younger or antique, to investigate and write approximately food in the Philippine context. ANCX lately visited Sta. Maria, in her modernist domicile in Quezon City, concentrates on her inspiring phrases over a marina of chocolate using a table from Agusan and special styles of bike full of cashew butter or guava—her small but extensive manner of showcasing Filipino fare at its most refined, resourceful, and scrumptious.
How did you start discovering food?
Do you realize the panguingue? I was given a venture for something that I knew sincerely nothing about, and I stated, ok, off I went to Lopez Memorial Library, which subsequently became my second home. I walked into the library, went through the card catalog, and on the route, there was no entry for panging… The first e-book that I noticed, the first e-book that I thumbed via, perhaps on the third page, changed into there: panguingue, and it became a footnote. Maybe this turned into a sign that I need to do this, and no longer simply girls’ interest articles.
What have you been looking for in your research?
I turned into a person who, if I saw a Spanish dish, any individual would usually say that it is cooked exactly the way my remarkable grandmother or her mother would have executed it. It troubled me. And I desired that allows you to understand how the dish I changed into consuming got to the manner it changed into, knowing that it became possible not like that at least one hundred years in the past. And that turned into the quest; that became how it started. And before I knew it, I turned into accumulating recipe books once I found them.
