THE CHINESE IN PINOY FOOD

Even though I don't cook Chinese food all the time, I can hardly step into my kitchen without encountering ingredients, equipment and cooking methods that can be traced back to China. Adding a dash of soy sauce to add deepness to my gravy? Stir-frying veggies in my wok or using my steamer as a healthy way to cook fish or chicken? These all have roots in Chinese cuisine.

- VICKY VELOSO-BARRERA

The deliciousness and variety of Chinese dishes make it probably the best known of Asian cuisines in the world. Where would we be without our regular dose of fried rice and dumplings, noodles and milk teas? Yet, even as Chinese elements permeated our culture, we embraced them with our own Filipino ingredients and sensibilities. Archeological evidence, as written about in Tsinoy: The Story of the Chinese in Philippine Life (Kaisa Para Sa Kaunlaran Inc.), shows that in prehistoric times, the Philippines was linked to other countries through land bridges, encouraging the ancient peoples to move about as they hunted for food. The diggings in the Hemudu archeological site near Hangzhou, China, reveal an ancient rice culture dating back 7,000 years. The fact that we share the same rice varieties and identical cooking earthenware, such as the palayok and kalan (pot and stove), are evidence of ties between the Philippines and the Yangtze civilizations in China, way before documented trade in the 11th century.

These Chinese traders, many of whom took Filipino wives, surely hankered for a taste of their homelands. As the late Clinton Palanca writes about in My Angkong's Noodles (Elizabeth Yu Gokongwei, publisher), these wives added local ingredients and the inputs of their own taste buds to create a hybrid cuisine. What resulted was a delicious mix of Chinese and Filipino food.

"Chinese Filipino cuisine or Tsinoy cuisine isn't as easy to define and categorize because a subsection of dishes was renamed to Spanish during the colonial period, probably to sound more upscale and sell better," says Tsinoy chef Sharwin Tee. "For example, we have Filipino dishes with Spanish names that are actually Tsinoy. The most common examples would be asado (char siu), arroz caldo (am be), and camaron rellenado (diok pit he)."