Hello there! There are a couple of you who’ve just started following my Substack. First of all: Thank you! My updates are sporadic and irregular, but every now and then, when I feel the need to overcome the blank-page terror that plagues me, I force myself to write a Substack.
So this is a little bit like cheating because this is an old piece that I did for Biter’s first issue on “asim.” Since I don’t want to bother Jonty (one-man team behind Biter, Out of Print publisher. Hi Jonty! Do you follow me here) to re-upload the old issue, I thought I’d put it on my Substack for whenever I’d want to revisit it. And if you haven’t read the latest issue of Biter on “almusal,” please do! Wrote a piece on Pancake House, but we can talk about that another day.
What happens when you eat sinigang for a month? Toni Potenciano reflects on her favorite sour dish and how it was always in the backdrop of some of her more crucial moments.
I love sour food. I can’t get enough of it. Among the five basic tastes, sour easily takes the top spot. Sweet is indulgent, spicy is invigorating, but sour is titillating. Literally mouth-watering. The Filipino word for sour sometimes refers to a kind of youthful virility: “May asim pa,” the men say. In the Philippines, sour isn’t rot, like milk past its expiration date. Sour is fresh and bright. It is desire and energy.
My love of sour is very likely cultural. Souring agents are a key component to much of Filipino cuisine, like vinegar for adobo and kinilaw. It’s also sour fruit: The tiny calamansi on the side of grilled meat and fish, crispy green mangoes with a little bit of chili salt, and sampalok—both the fruit and the leaves—in a bowl of piping hot sinigang with a bowl of rice.
Filipino food historian Doreen Fernandez called sinigang the dish “most representative of Filipino taste,” which is another way of saying that it is a dish we might fight the least about. It’s perfectly democratic: No definitive recipe nor a hard-and-fast method. It’s a soup composed of boiled vegetables and a protein of choice, like pork, beef, fish, and shrimp. In some places, there’s even sinigang with chicken feet.
But it is sourness that makes it specific. Sinigang is soured by tomatoes and sampalok, but there are many variations of sinigang with fruits like bayabas, chico, kamias, and katmon. There’s sinigang sa alibangbang, batwan, and even watermelon. All of these are sinigang. Recipes differ per region or province and they get even more specific per household.
There is scant literature on the history of the dish, but scholars believe that our love of sour food predates Spanish colonialization. Fernandez in her seminal essay called “Why Sinigang” postulates that our proximity to the sea not only determined what we ate but even the way we prepared our food. Our love of sour was not just a way to cool down in a hot climate, but a way to balance out lansa or the overpowering smell of fish. Methods like grilling, steaming, or even having our fish raw with a hint of citrus serve as proof of our inherent love of freshness.
Others speculate sinigang is an offshoot of singgang, a hot and sour soup from Malaysia’s eastern coast, brought to us through migration and trade. It’s a plausible explanation: Singgang is composed of fish and vegetables lightly boiled in a broth flavored by galangal and soured by tamarind peel, not too different from our own sinigang sa sampalok.
I want to believe that this love of sour and sinigang is only natural to us as Filipinos. Long before I ever thought hard about the food I ate—or thought about anything, really—I knew I loved sinigang. I was a picky eater (a wretch, an ingrate) but sinigang always called for seconds. Hot and sour soup, fresh vegetables, tender meat, and fragrant rice. What more was there to want?
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Under the reign of COVID-19 but around the time we had gotten into the tedium of living with restrictions, I picked up cooking. I say that a little joylessly. The truth is that I love to eat and I love to eat good food, which is why I am always disappointed whenever I have to cook. Everything could always use a little more salt and a little more time in the pan. My husband tells me it’s part of the journey, but the burden of troubleshooting on top of planning, shopping, prepping, storing, combining, heating, and serving robs me of the joy of eating.
So I learned to cook but cut corners where I could. We’d cook food that could last for days and cooked them in large batches. After multiple rounds of adobo, I decided that our next meal would be sinigang. I checked the time difference between Manila and San Francisco and called my mom.
I was around 13 years old when my dad became an OFW. The reason was that a blue collar job in America could afford prestigious Filipino education for three kids. My mom followed eight years later when I turned 21, saying that it was time for her and my dad to finally be together after years of separation.
And there was no reason for her not to do it. Her move to the US would give her first world healthcare and a humane wage. There, she could work towards a pension and a retirement plan. It also meant the end of my mother’s long crying spells, the heavy air that hung in the house after my dad’s brief vacations in the Philippines.
Unmentioned in these conversations, even though it weighed heavily on all of us, was that she was trading their separation for ours. She’d just say we were old enough, responsible enough to be without a mom from now on. I was almost nearly a year into my first job as a researcher for the communications office of a then sitting Philippine president. A job we (my parents and I) mutually considered to be a dream job, one that would leave me “set for life.”
This marked the beginning of my own sad spells and the semi-permanent fatigue of homemaking. I didn’t know it at the time, but she kept a tight ship. I’d come to miss the feeling of a house already made, ready solutions for each of its myriad of problems, and bills somehow accounted for.
But I learned. Who else was going to do it? I learned to read our water meter and to speak to our landlord. I attuned myself to the rhythms of the house. I made sure that the need to buy toilet paper and laundry soap didn’t coincide with the day electricity was due. I resented it at first, because all I wanted to do then was to go to nihilistic club parties without having to wake up to another day of mothering my siblings. I eventually learned to absorb this ache till it became a weight I no longer noticed.
“The trick is to cook down the tomatoes with the garlic first,” she says. “Also, brown the pork before you add the water.”
“Do I need to add any salt?” I ask.
“Just adjust the sourness with the sinigang mix when you’re nearly done,” she adds with a yawn. She was just about to go to bed when I called. “You can’t mess it up.”
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There was a time in my life I couldn’t eat sinigang, because I had spent a year eating only sinigang. Or something that approximated it. It was the year I first felt my body dysmorphia dig its spindly roots. It was sad how textbook it was: I was 16 and I wasn’t skinny. Or at least, not as skinny as the girls in my group. Furthermore, they were pretty. Or pretty at least to the boys who texted them everyday.
At this age, I internalized the notion that a girl must be desirable, if not exceptional, in order to be valuable. The thing was that I wasn’t good at school and I didn’t excel at sports. Losing weight on the other hand didn’t require giftedness or talent and–in my limited point of view–the rewards were instant and plentiful. I was convinced that if I shrunk myself to the size of my friends I would be happier. That I could be more visible the smaller I was.
For nearly a year, I ate the same meal every day, once a day: A cup of rice and a bowl of sinigang soup, kangkong, and boiled fishballs. It was uncomplicated, which made it easy to abuse. Above all, it was cheap, which meant that it could fly safely under the radar of my mother, who was often too tired to notice our growing pains.
I can’t for the life of me remember how I stopped eating fishballs with sinigang or when I started eating other foods besides that. But the effect of those years reverberated well into my adulthood, like the unnecessary self-hatred I’d feel after heavy meals and full cups of rice. I even blamed the size of my body for my failed relationships. That I was cheated on, not because my ex was a sociopath, but because I wasn’t thin enough.
It wasn’t until I was older, a few years into running our household, that I realized how so much of that was nonsense. I had bought into the false equivalence that I needed to be thin in order to be loved. That this self-pity was actually a form of narcissism: No one really thinks of me nearly as much as how often I think of myself, let alone the size of my stomach or my arms. And that my relationships failed for other reasons but not because of the size of my body.
When I leaned into this, I felt liberated. I could wear clothes without sleeves and enjoy food a little more with a lot less of the adjunct guilt. I learned to work on the other parts of myself that I’d need to float through this life. I sometimes remember those years whenever I have sinigang. And when I do, I always think: I gave up the taste of real sinigang… For what?
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My mother-in-law, the most practical woman on the planet, was puzzled by my latest assignment. I told her I was writing about sinigang and, as part of the process, I’d eat and order sinigang from all kinds of Filipino restaurants.
“‘Di ba pwede gawin mo na lang?” She asked. My eldest sister, mother of two, said something similar. “We don’t really order sinigang while we’re out. The best sinigang is the one we make at home.”
But I did it anyway. Taking my husband out on our first restaurant dates in years just to eat sinigang. At times we’d order in, and there really is something to be said about the incompatibility of sinigang and delivery. I was trying to manifest a sublime sinigang experience worth writing about, that somehow an epiphany could be willed into existence after enough bowls.
We tried Mamou’s rich and herby Kurobota Pork Sinigang, Manam’s sweet and bright Beef Short Rib and Watermelon Sinigang. One weekend, we had Provenciano’s Sinigang na Tadyang and O’ini’s purple Sinigang na Baboy with Ube. For weeks, I was looking for a moment of illumination—an angle. When that didn’t happen, I pestered the restaurant managers and chefs, hoping for profundity.
Rau Fores of Mamou told me that the use of Kurobota was inspired by a family trip to Tokyo. His mother, Mamou herself, wondered how the fatty pork would fare in a bowl of sinigang instead of deepfried katsu. The Moment Group Co-founder Abba Napa wrote to me about how the original watermelon sinigang was originally a soup that used broccoli and lemons. Co-founder Eli Antonino’s mother longed for sinigang during an extended stay in New York, but did what she could using the only ingredients available to her.
“What exactly are you looking for,” asked my ever supportive husband, who would split whole servings of sinigang good for a family of four with me without question.
“I’ll know it when I taste it,” I shrugged.
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We arrived at the home of my in-laws in Lipa, Batangas for the weekend. My husband volunteered that he and I would be preparing lunch for everybody. Our menu? Our household’s version of sinigang na baboy. “Sinigang just wasn’t part of our household’s regular rotation,” explained my husband over our nth bowl one week. “And I think they’d really like your mom’s version of it.”
When we served it for lunch, my father-in-law (a man of few words) was the first to speak: “Pwede na mag asawa,” he joked. Relief washed over me. Cooking has always been a chore, yet another thing in the long list of things I’m not very good at. But sinigang has been the one thing I could make without relying on a precise recipe or measurements. It’s a dish I’ve learned to make through instinct, even if the method differs each time. As long as it somehow tastes like the sinigang I grew up with, the one I’d come home to when my mom was still around to make it for me, then I know it’ll be good. If not for the people I’m making it for, then—at the very least—it’ll be good enough for me.
The steps to my mother’s sinigang are simple: Cook the tomatoes down with the garlic till both are soft and fragrant. Brown and sear the pork cuts. Pour water over the fond. Bring to a boil then let it simmer. Add the vegetables and pour in the sinigang mix to taste.
To taste. One of sinigang’s two cardinal rules. First, sinigang is determined by the availability and freshness of its key components. Second, its taste and sourness depends solely on preference. Even at restaurants, waiters would come up to our table with little saucers of soup to ask if the sourness was “to my liking,” which is why sinigang can never lie.
That’s another truth about sinigang: It isn’t that complicated. Even the most halfhearted of cooks don’t need much to land somewhere decent. In terms of food, sinigang sits neatly in the coveted intersection of low effort and high reward. At 31—a whole decade and a pandemic after my mother left for America—I’m old enough to know just how precious that is.
My mom’s sinigang isn’t particularly novel, but it’s the sinigang I know. It’s probably the sinigang her own mom taught her. It’s the sinigang that’ll remind me of my childhood and the years my mom was still home to cook for us. It’ll remind me of the years I can never get back. But it will also be the sinigang I make for my husband and his family—my new family. And if we ever get there, it might even be the sinigang I’ll pass on to my own children.
And after eating all that sinigang, I’m far from sick of it. I’d make it tomorrow if I could. I can eat sinigang forever, just as long as I don’t eat it alone.*
