José Rizal’s favorite dishes as gleaned from his Dapitan letters
1892-1896 Jose Rizal was exile in Dapitan. Accounts
have it that he accomplished so much in those four years. He built his home
made of bamboo. He planted fruit trees around the perimeter of his residence.
He established a school. He practiced medicine and was renowned for his eye
operations. He built an aqueduct, a feat of engineering considering he had no
heavy-duty tools.
More interesting, however, is what makes him human, such as his requests
for food from his family as gathered from his letters documented in
“Reminiscences and Travels of José Rizal” (1977), and “One Hundred Letters of
José Rizal to his Parents, Brothers, Sisters, Relatives” (1959), both published
by the National Historical Institute.
Rizal requested his mother, Teodora Alonso, for instance, to send him
some Laguna cheese, mangoes and “terrinas de foie gras.” The cheese, of course,
is made very well in his home province, Laguna. Filipinos will always miss
mangoes. The foie gras made me smile because it must have been as expensive as
it is now. It must have reminded him of his visit to Juan Luna in his studio in
Paris. The photograph in this column was sent by Ambeth Ocampo, who surmised
that this must have been when the “Pinoys attended the Paris Expo” in 1889.
Rizal requested the same food items in a letter to his sister, Narcisa.
What was available and what they cooked also made for interesting reading.
He wrote to another sister, Trinidad, that there were so many fruits to eat
such as pineapples, atis and mangoes. He said he ate beef rarely and that he
slaughtered one chicken a month. Pork was eaten more often, so that he
expressed being tired of pork, and because more than five pigs a month were
slaughtered, there was much more lard than the household could use even if he
gave some away.
In the same letter, he wrote that “fish is becoming scarce, and we only
have anchovy and small shrimps.” Vegetables were also scant because Rizal
hadn’t been planting anymore. That’s probably why he told his sister, Maria,
that they had no more viand and requested for “tokwa (soy bean cake), monggo
and dried small fish.”
It is Josephine Bracken who kept house for Rizal in Dapitan. Miss B, as
he called her, makes suman, bagoong, bread and chili miso, adding that she has
made so much of the bagoong and chili miso to last 10 years. When Rizal asked
for angkak, it was for the bagoong. When they didn’t have noodles for pancit,
Miss B made a kind of long macaroni noodles out of flour and eggs, which serves
the purpose.”
In the last Christmas he spent in Dapitan, Rizal wrote: “We killed a
small pig and a hen; we invited our neighbors; there was dancing; we laughed a
great deal until dawn. We did not sleep on 31 December until the New Year.”
It is in another book where we learned about a dish served by Rizal to
his nephews and nieces who visited him there. Mila Enriquez, in “Kasaysayan ng
Kaluto ng Bayan” (Zita Publishing Corp., 1993), wrote that Francisco Rizal
Lopez, a descendant, said that it is monggo soup with the young leaves of
ampalaya. The hero’s sister, Narcisa, surmised that the soup must have
contained shrimp, chicken and mushrooms harvested from the area. And probably
the surprising addition of panocha for a sweetish taste.
