Angela Dimayuga captures the abundance of the Filipino table in debut cookbook

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Our cookbook of the week is Filipinx: Heritage Recipes from the Diaspora by Angela Dimiyuga and Ligaya Mishan. To try a recipe from the book, check out: Bistek (seared rib eye with lemon and onions), laing with flowers (greens stewed in coconut milk) and longganisa (Filipino-style chorizo).

Bright and bold, ebullient and heartfelt, Angela Dimayuga’s debut cookbook conveys a sense of plenty.

“I wanted to show abundance as an opposition to the scarcity mentality that we have as first-generation (Filipino Americans) or a many times colonized country. An abundance with food; abundance with sharing, generosity,” says the New York-based chef and author of Filipinx (Abrams, 2021), which she wrote with writer Ligaya Mishan.

Dimayuga was born and raised in San Jose, Calif., the fifth of six children. Her lola (grandmother) Josefina would cook for days in preparation for family celebrations. “Acting like a caterer,” she packed her condo fridge and cupboards with food for Dimayuga and her 40 cousins.

“The first 10 recipes of the book that I started with, it was such a challenge to think about, ‘Wait, I have to pare this down for two to four people.’ Like this is so unnatural to me,” says Dimayuga, laughing. “Not everyone has families like this. Not everyone cooks at this scale.”

Filipinx is an anthology of what she grew up eating. Most of the roughly 100 recipes — including merienda (snacks), celebratory feasts and “elemental” rice — poured out the first time she sat down to write the chapter breakdown.

This ease was due to “a knowing,” says Dimayuga. She has enjoyed most of these dishes all her life; “training” as a child to learn about Filipino cuisine — watching and tasting her mother and grandmother’s cooking.

From 2018 to early 2020, Dimayuga was the creative director of food and culture for the Standard hotels. Filipinx became her “pandemic baby.”

The stillness of 2020 ended up allowing her the time to devote herself to the book; to examine her emotional connections to the cuisine and build on her knowledge by researching Filipino culture and history.

“I’ve been to the Philippines once when I was 20. I’m 36 now, and it feels really promising to know that I can learn about who I am as a Filipino being sort of in-between,” says Dimayuga.

The abundance she communicates in the recipes — especially in celebratory dishes such as pastel de lengua (ox tongue pie in mushrooms sauce) and chicken relleno (whole roasted chicken stuffed with embutido) — plays out visually as well.

One of her favourite aspects of the project was being creative director, says Dimayuga. As someone who usually creates ephemeral experiences, she enjoyed the process of producing a permanent object.

Through their research, Dimayuga and Mishan discovered information about their shared culture “that made (them) a lot more proud.” Some of these discoveries appear as design elements throughout the book.

The floral pattern on the cover and endpapers, for example, replicates piña cloth. Filipino weavers use pineapple leaf fibres — a waste material — to make the sheer, silk-like fabric, which is sewn into garments and decorated with embroidery.

These embellishments didn’t arise for purely aesthetic reasons, though, Dimayuga explains. They were a form of resistance.

During the Spanish colonial period in the Philippines (1521–1898), Filipino men were mandated to wear untucked piña cloth shirts (barong tagalog), she says. Because they weren’t allowed to conceal money or weapons, the transparent fabric would reveal all.

“So, what they did to have pride in what they were forced to wear is painstakingly create these hand-sewn decorative elements on their shirts,” says Dimayuga. “It’s just so healing to know that this is what our people did.”

Though she grew up wearing these garments on special occasions, she didn’t look into why until she researched the book. It was meaningful for her to include a reference — not for the sake of decoration, but for cultural significance.

The same went for motifs used in Indigenous Filipino tattooing. When the Spanish first arrived in the 16th century, they called the Philippines “Los Islas de los Pintados” — “The Island of the Painted Ones” — because of the prevalence of traditional tattoos, Dimayuga adds.

Among the motifs that caught her eye was pang-ti-i’, which resembles an upside-down ‘L.’ A symbol of abundance, it signifies a stalk, heavy with rice, ready to be harvested.

“I wanted to pepper that throughout the book and have an opportunity to explain it in the rice cooking section, which instead of it being a line-by-line recipe, is more of a story,” says Dimayuga.

“I love the idea of recipes as oral tradition. So, I felt like it was important to — within a book that has a lot of weights and measurements — also celebrate the fact that recipes are shared through oral tradition. And oftentimes those recipes are shared by oral tradition by the free labour of the matriarchs in our families, right, and how powerful that is.”

As a child, Dimayuga’s view of what it meant to be a chef was defined by watching PBS cooking shows, especially the “French-American cultural exchange” of Jacques Pepin and Julia Child.

After cooking in casual settings like cafés, she opened a catering company at age 20. When she started working in restaurants, “where I got to use really great ingredients, it was always by way of French technique, or then French or Italian technique.”

It wasn’t until 2012, when Dimayuga became the executive chef at the New York location of San Francisco’s Mission Chinese Food, that she began to draw on Filipino flavours. Since she was now an executive chef, her lola Josefina considered her ready to learn her long-held secret recipe for chicken relleno.

Dimayuga was struck by the skill involved and began to see Filipino cuisine in a new light.

“Getting to learn how to make that was in ways, maybe even more technique driven than dishes that I was learning in a French-style kitchen,” she says.

“So, that was really exciting, because that meant it built a self-confidence in intuition of cooking and seasoning by way of ancestral guidance. Or even just as a young person getting to taste how my grandmother seasons.”

This experience transformed her as a chef and sparked the idea for Filipinx. “That was just the beginning of the journey of really learning to honour, see it, and respect it — and decide to help contribute to that by way of this book.”

Dimayuga honours her lola Josefina — who died in 2018, shortly after celebrating her 100th birthday — by sharing her story and highlighting some of her signature dishes in Filipinx, such as bistek (seared rib eye with lemon and onions) and chicken relleno.

Other recipes are homages to memories (e.g., corn slush, kernels cut from the cob, boiled with sugar, frozen overnight and blended until smooth) or arose from art projects she collaborated on with friends (e.g., “reverse aging” cocktail, made with ingredients that could conceivably be found on a tropical island in a dystopian future — coconut milk, lime zest, spirulina and sea salt).

Some are dishes she hadn’t had since she was a child. Developing them, Dimayuga says, was like teleportation.

“It made me feel like a real descendant of my grandmother. Just imagining my grandmother’s little hands, like old woman hands, painstakingly making these little mochi balls for a tropical fruit coconut soup (ginataang bilo-bilo). And remembering what that’s like.”

One of the most popular recipes in the book, coconut milk chicken adobo, was inspired by a recipe in “a crusty paperback book from the ‘70s” that she and her older brother came across. She hadn’t cooked it since childhood, but having developed it further, now has her own version to share.

“I don’t like the word innovation for this. It’s more about, ‘What is my contribution of my time and place right now that I would like to do?’ If you’re a musician and you make a song and you record it, that’s the song. That’s the hit for like 20 years,” says Dimayuga.

“That’s something that is nice about cooking, that then you can keep tweaking it ever so slightly and mastering it for yourself.”

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