If you had sat down to dinner at the Manila Hotel in 1936, only a few dishes on the menu would have been Filipino. Most of the items—the olives in the India relish, chicken gumbo soup, braised sweetbreads, squab casserole, beans, carrots, potatoes, and petits fours—were so classically French that you easily could have been in a hotel in New York or London. A few Filipino items—mango frappé, pili nuts, lapu-lapu in browned butter, and bamboo shoot salad—hinted at the hotel’s location in America’s most important imperial colony in Asia. But the meal made clear that Western food was a marker of class and refinement.1
This chapter explores how American reformers attempted to transform culinary knowledge and practices in the Philippines during the forty-eight years when the country was an American colony. I show how food, a basic object of everyday life, was used as a signal of cultural change by American reformers. I first describe how the public schools transformed thinking about food. Girls studied domestic science and home economics, and boys studied agriculture. Both further developed their culinary knowledge in secondary schools, vocational schools, and universities. Next, I look at food advertisements from popular Philippine magazines and newspapers. American food companies claimed superiority over their Filipino competitors and used slick artwork, ad copy, and allusions to Filipino and American culture to cultivate consumers’ desires. Last, I examine popular cookbooks from the Philippines. These publications connected the products in the advertisements to the lessons on cooking from schools using European and American recipes. Together, these three areas—education, advertising, and cookbooks—attempted to Americanize the Filipino palate.
Before examining these reform efforts, I review how Americans regarded Filipino food at the start of the twentieth century.
Most Americans arriving in the Philippines after the Spanish-American War did not want to eat Filipino food. Businessmen like Charles Morris asserted that Manila’s restaurants were “primitive in character” and offered “little more than rice and fruits for sale.”2 Similarly, American teacher Herbert I. Priestley deemed the food in Bicol to be “not of a kind or quality to support white people.”3 The food was not enticing to American soldier John Clifford Brown, despite his monotonous army diet of hardtack and canned beef. “I have yet to see a soldier who would tackle any of the cooked dishes,” he said, “and a soldier will try almost anything.”4 The American surveyor José de Olivares labeled Filipino customers at roadside restaurants as “vindictive and treacherous—just the kind of people that all good Americans desire to keep away from.”5 American reformers thus had many motives to transform Filipino food and impose American culinary standards. They first targeted the schools by introducing lessons on cooking, eating, and farming.
American public schools transformed Philippine daily life. They introduced lessons in civics, self-government, and vocational training and, most notably, made English the national language. American teachers, confident that their new curriculum was a vast improvement over the Catholic educational system of the Spanish period, brought lessons in nutrition, hygiene, and agriculture.
The 1929 publication A Tentative Guide for Health Education in Elementary Schools demonstrates the new importance of food instruction in its lists of the yearly objectives of food instruction for teachers from grades 1 through 6. Grade 1 students were to learn the greater nutritional benefits of imported canned condensed milk than those of carabao (buffalo) milk and the superiority of Western whole grains to rice. Grade 2’s lessons stressed etiquette: eating slowly, sitting down while chewing, and chewing one’s food thoroughly. Grade 3 taught students how to identify foods that strengthened bones and teeth, and grade 4 focused on memorizing the nutritional value of whole grains, fruits, vegetables, and milk. Grade 4 also advocated the elimination of merienda, or midday snacks between meals. Grades 5 and 6 targeted hygiene, with lessons on protecting food from dirt and flies, the use of clean individual drinking cups, and consuming water for proper digestion.6
After grade 6, food instruction was divided by gender. Girls trained in kitchens and boys trained on farms. Alice Fuller’s Housekeeping: A Textbook for Girls in Public Intermediate Schools of the Philippines lists the recipes that girls in middle school were required to learn, such as hot cakes, corn bread, muffins, biscuits, drop sponge cakes, jelly rolls, doughnuts, and cookies. University home economics and domestic science classes standardized food instruction even further. The Philippine Normal School, the country’s teachers college, required all female students, regardless of major, to take three semesters of domestic science, one year of botany with an emphasis on food values, one year of physiology with an emphasis on female hygiene, and one year of domestic science.7 All female students at the University of the Philippines took two courses on the principles of cooking, nutrition, home arts, and citizenship training. The university’s general catalog even listed a course devoted to “the intelligent selection of imported goods as well as those locally produced.”8 Food thus was an integral part of a female student’s education.
Filipino boys studied how to farm and export cash crops like sugar, tobacco, and coconuts. Schools like the Silliman Institute in Dumaguete tailored their instruction to specific regions and climates so seventh-grade boys could specialize in the culture and care of papayas, bananas, pomelos, oranges, lemons, Chico cacao, and tobacco.9 Their textbooks praise farmers and underscore their importance to the nation’s future. Edwin Bingham Copeland, the director of agriculture for the public schools, wrote in his textbook Elements of Philippine Agriculture that Filipino boys studying agriculture were “not only preparing themselves for the most general industry of these islands, but are helping by their work, in school after school, in the uplifting of their people.” Copeland urged Filipino students to study hard and surpass Hawai‘i in sugar and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in coconut production.10 Another school that focused on farming was the Central Luzon Agricultural School in Muñoz, the 658-hectare home to 1,038 students who ran their own movie house, sawmill, general store, bank, and printing press. Profits from these student-run businesses paid for a local granary, gardens, and poultry and hog projects. The Philippine government tried to replicate Central Luzon’s success with new campuses in Mountain Province, Camarines Sur, Samar, Abra, and Palawan. In addition, it created 272 rural high schools, fourteen farm schools, and 274 settlement farm schools.
The public schools changed more than just how food was prepared and produced. American educators credited them for creating a Philippine middle class with new tastes and preferences for consumer goods. As M. E. Polley wrote in 1929,
Education has created in the large middle class desires for comforts, luxuries, and pleasures of modern life far in excess of the desires for these blessings among the upper class two decades ago, and they are satisfying those desires by wearing better clothing, eating better food, living in better and more sanitary homes, having more diversions, traveling more and with better means of transportation, and giving their children better education.11
Thus, a range of imported products entered the country, and advertisers cultivated the Filipino consumer desire for new goods.
Food advertisements capitalized on public school lessons by invoking hygiene, nutrition, and sanitation. Ads asserted that American goods were symbols of sophistication and worldliness available to Filipino consumers halfway around the world and that they were better than Filipino items simply because they were American. In addition, they were easily adaptable to Filipino daily life and conveniently bridged differences between Filipino and American culture.
Many ads contended that American goods were superior because they met government inspection standards. For example, an advertisement for Hershey’s Chocolate in 1938 announced, “Every tin of Hershey’s ‘Breakfast’ Cocoa must conform to U.S. Government and Bureau of Health standards for fat content and fineness of powder.”12 Another advertisement in 1931 for Libby’s boasted that its cold storerooms met high sanitation and hygiene standards.13
Ads expanded on the theme of American superiority by invoking nutrition. Condensed milk ads repeatedly stressed their products were more nutritious than native carabao (buffalo) or coconut milk and connected them to the country’s future by stating that milk was essential to the individual success of Filipino children. A 1927 Horlick’s ad stated that malted milk gave “the glow of health to pale cheeks,” “a sparkle in the eye,” and a chance for a Filipino boy “to head his class.”14 Carnation connected its evaporated milk to the nation’s future, stating, “Happy, healthy babies bring joy to your home. They represent the country’s future wealth.”15 These appeals made milk into a product larger than food; they became essential to the country’s future.
Other ads combined American and Filipino images to suggest the mingling of Western power and taste in Philippine settings. The National Biscuit Company, the predecessor of today’s Nabisco, printed images of George Washington, the U.S. Capitol dome, and the Stars and Stripes on its biscuit tins.16 Jacob’s Milk Crackers announced that its crackers could be consumed “at meal time, between meals, for hungry boys and girls, afternoon tea or merienda.”17 It underscored this adaptability with an image of a Filipina mother dressed in the traditional clothing alongside her son dressed in Western attire. Del Monte provided the most literal depiction of Philippine-American imagery in a 1926 ad for Queen Anne cherries. The ad illustrated the journey from central California to a bahay kubo, or nipa hut, in the Philippine province. It further appealed to Filipino readers by presenting a mother and son in everyday clothing walking home from the market with canned goods. These ads told Filipino consumers that Filipinos could easily welcome these products into their homes, regardless of class or location.18
Ads for Heinz Tomato Ketchup and Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce blended traditional Filipino dishes and recipes with American products. A 1926 Heinz ad offered ketchup with lechon, or spit-roasted pig, traditionally served as a fiesta dish. The typical lechon sauce combined brown sugar, lemongrass, and minced pork offal, so pairing it with ketchup was very different. Heinz romanticized this departure by depicting tomato ketchup next to Filipino items such as a parol (decorative star), a bahay kubo (nipa hut), and a clay palayok (pot).19 A 1929 ad for Lea & Perrins offered a recipe for adobo, the Philippine national dish, that included Worcestershire sauce. Lea & Perrins made its case for adding this Western condiment to a familiar recipe by saying, “Great cooks in the most outstanding hotels and clubs in the world are using the famous sauce.” The recipe called for three pounds of pork, one and a half cups of vinegar, one tablespoon of salt, eight cloves of garlic, and a half cup of water. After marinating, browning, and braising the pork, the cook added one tablespoon of Lea & Perrins to finish the sauce.20 In this way, any Filipino could easily incorporate American condiments into favorite dishes.
Recipes also inspired this essay’s third subject: cookbooks, which gave Filipinos instructions for making new dishes, especially the ones from Europe and the United States. They were an extension of lessons from the classroom and enabled home kitchens in the Philippines to become familiar with other traditions and cuisines.
Cookbooks provided practical instructions and directions for cooking Western dishes. They served as primers for the proper preparation and selection of ingredients as well as references for basic nutrition and hygiene. Most cookbooks that were published in the Philippines contained recipes from France, Spain, and the United States reflected the publishers’ desire to bring foreign cooking into Filipino homes.
Two cookbooks exemplify this desire to popularize European cookery: Rosendo Ignacio’s Aklat ng pagluluto and Crispulo Trinidad’s Pasteleria at reposteria offered classical French and traditional Spanish recipes to Tagalog readers.21 Although Aklat ng pagluluto’s first two chapters focused on hygiene and sanitation, the rest of the book was a collection of classical French and Spanish recipes. For example, the chapter on sauces had recipes for mayonnaise, hollandaise, white espagñole, and white velouté. The soup chapter included Parisien pot-au-feu, consommé with cream, codfish stew, and asparagus. The chapter on beef described preparations for oxtails, meatballs, roast beef, filled beef rolls, tongue, and pigs’ trotters, along with Spanish stewed bacalao, bacalao in mayonnaise, and Mallorca calamares. Finally, the baking chapter had French basics like flour doughs, flans and custards, flans with fruit, puddings with fruit, pastry creams, sugared fruits, meringues, cakes, tarts, breads, wafers, biscuits, doughnuts, and rolls. To combat the heat, the book suggested iced-cheese, milk, butter, pineapple, coconut, Chantilly, milk flower, Burgundy, and hollandaise sorbets. Aklat ng pagluluto was the guidebook for Tagalog readers eager to bring French culinary techniques into their homes.
The second cookbook, Pasteleria at reposteria, contained translations into Tagalog of French, German, British, and Spanish baking recipes, especially those for basic doughs and fillings, tarts filled with Gruyere cheese, almonds, toasted rice, chocolate, licorice, and raisins. There were pastels, timbals, and empanadas filled with truffles, almonds, crab, oysters, lamb, poultry, hot onions, fish, and vegetables. Basic pastry sauces and creams such as Spanish, German, crème pâtissière, and two kinds of béchamel accompanied fillings of vanilla, chocolate, toasted rice, caramel, almonds, fruits, pistachios, cider, peppermint, cherry, apple, and potatoes. In dramatic fashion, the cookbook ended with a chapter on soufflés.
The majority of popular cookbooks in the Philippines, however, were written in English or Spanish and usually were published by the government. Everyday Cookery for the Home, in both English and Spanish, by Sofia Reyes de Veyra, was printed in 1934 by the Philippine Education Company. De Veyra adapted recipes from the Ladies’ Home Journal to suit the needs, conditions, tastes, and temperament of a Filipino audience. The book did include Filipino recipes such as those for baked lapu-lapu (grouper), bangus (milkfish) loaf, camote (sweet potato) waffles, glacéed camote, mango whip, mango fluff, ubi (purple yam) pudding, pinipig (toasted rice) cookies and macaroons, buko (coconut) ice cream, pili (box tree) nut brownies, and calamansi (calamondin) syrup punch. But there were six times as many American recipes in the cookbook as Filipino recipes.22
One cookbook originally published in 1922 and republished in 1978 showed how Filipinos gradually embraced their food over time. Good Cooking and Health in the Tropics, by Mrs. Samuel Francis Gaches, is full of American, Spanish, and Asian recipes. Gaches believed that Filipinos deserved better food, and her book complains about the state of country’s food supply. She explains how inefficient transportation and distribution translate into high prices for seafood. She criticizes unregulated market vendors for what she dubbed “the Oriental custom of having no fixed price but making everything a matter of haggling.”23 Although the cookbook does offer a few Filipino recipes written by two Filipina nurses educated in the United States, most of them are for American food.24 In 1978, the book was reprinted with a new introduction by Carlos Quirino. He writes that even though the original 1922 edition had just a few Filipino recipes, Filipino cuisine had become popular in sophisticated circles two generations since the book’s original printing. Filipino dishes were now served “in grand parties and buffets” and in a “proliferation of Filipino restaurants.” Pride in Filipino cuisine had finally arrived. Quirino celebrates the past by praising the Filipinos, for even though they had “adapted the cakes and desserts and preserves and salads from the American era, [they] preferred the Mechados, Cocidos and Rellenos of the Spaniards, the Humba, Taucho, pansit of the Chinese.”25
The exchange of food went in both directions. Filipino recipes appeared in the United States after Philippine independence in 1946, especially as immigration from the Philippines to the United States increased with the passage of the Immigration Reform Act of 1965. Nora V. Daza’s Galing-Galing: The First Philippine Cookbook for Use in the United States targeted Filipinos abroad who missed the flavors of home. Private school and church cookbooks printed adobo recipes, and the Los Angeles Times Cookbook gave adobo mainstream treatment in 1981.26 The long story of food exchanges between the United States and the Philippines now flipped as Americans tried adobo for themselves.
Today, the Manila Hotel retains many of the features from 1936. Much of the building is the same, with the grand ballroom, the promenade by Manila Bay, and the facade remaining largely intact. What has changed is the hotel’s own kitchens’ pride in Filipino food. Menus in the Manila Hotel now feature Filipino specialties alongside Western fare. A hotel guest can now choose between a breakfast of tapsilog—a combination of cured meat, garlic fried rice, and a fried egg—or a continental breakfast. The country’s food tastes are now shaped by a transnational population proud of its regional culinary traditions and open to new ideas brought to the country by overseas foreign workers. American education, advertising, and cookbooks tried to change the Filipino palate. But favoring Western cuisine at the expense of Filipino cuisine no longer works. Today, Filipino food combines pride in the past and a careful selection from the present.
1. Dinner Menu, Manila Hotel, March 18, 1936, New York Historical Society.
2. Charles Morris, Our Island Empire (Philadelphia, 1899), 408–9.
3. Herbert I. Priestley to Ethel Priestley, September 4, 1901, Herbert I. Priestley Papers, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.
4. John Clifford Brown, Diary of a Soldier in the Philippines (Portland, ME: Lakeside Press, 1901), 54–55.
5. José de Olivares, Our Islands and Their People: As Seen with Camera and Pencil (New York: N. D. Thompson Publishing, 1899), 553, 761.
6. Department of Public Instruction, A Tentative Guide for Health Education in Elementary Schools (Manila: Bureau of Education, 1929), 13–29.
7. Bureau of Education, Philippine Normal School Bulletin no. 30: Catalogue for 1909–1910 (Manila: Bureau of Education, 1909), 16, 22–23.
8. University of the Philippines, General Catalogue, 1958–1959 (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1958), 315.
9. Silliman Truth, April 1, 1917, 2–3.
10. Edwin Bingham Copeland, Elements of Philippine Agriculture (New York: World Book, 1908), 2.
11. M. E. Polley, “Public School System of the Philippines,” School and Society 30 (October 19, 1929): 544–48.
12. Advertisement for Hershey’s Cocoa, Philippine Magazine, January 1938, 65.
13. Advertisement for Libby’s, Liwayway, August 14, 1931, 48.
14. Advertisement for Horlick’s, Graphic Magazine, December 31, 1927, back cover.
15. Advertisement for Carnation Milk, Philippine Magazine, November 1, 1936, back cover.
16. Advertisement for National Biscuit Company, Liwayway, December 23, 1932, 47; and Advertisement for National Biscuit Company, Excelsior, January 10, 1933, 14.
17. Advertisement for Jacob’s Milk Crackers, Graphic Magazine, April 20, 1929, back cover.
18. Advertisement for Del Monte, Liwayway, June 11, 1926, back cover.
19. Advertisement for Heinz, Liwayway, April 2, 1926, back cover.
20. Advertisement for Lea & Perrins, Liwayway, February 1, 1929, 18.
21. Rosendo Ignacio, Aklat ng Pagluluto: Hinango sa lalòng bantóg dakilàng aklát ng pagluluto sa gawîng Europa at sa Filipinas, na kapuwà nasusulat sa wikàng kastilà, at isinataglog ng boong katiyagâan ni Rosendo Ignacio (Manila: Ikalawang pagkalimbag, 1919); Crispulo Trinidad, Pasteleria at reposteria: Francesa at Española: Aklat na ganap na naglalaman ng maraming palacada sa pag-gaua ng lahat ng mga bagay-bagay na matamis at mga pasteles (Manila: Limbagan ni J. Martinez, 1919).
22. Sofia Reyes de Veyra, Everyday Cookery for the Home (Manila: Philippine Education Company, 1934).
23. Mrs. Samuel Francis Gaches, Good Cooking and Health in the Tropics (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1922), 118.
24. The items listed as Filipino that appear in the cookbook are atchara, bataw, buko, bulanglang sitaw, cardillo, chicken with malungay leaves, escabeche, fish tortilla, fresh corn, gabi, guava, kilawin, lagat lobster or shrimp, lutong talunan, makapuno preserves, mongo guisado, mongo pods, pakam, paksiw, paksiw pig’s pata, patani, patola, pesa chicken, pesang isda, picadillo with potatoes, pinakbet, puso, sarciado cabbage, sinigang beef, sinigang fish, sinigang, sitaw, stuffed broiled fish, talong diningdeng, tachio, tinola chicken, upo diningdeng, and upo guisado. The ice-cream flavors are atis, coconut, makapuno, mango, pineapple, pinipig, and ube.
25. Carlos Quirino, Culinary Arts in the Tropics Circa 1922 (Manila: Regal Publishing, 1978), 32.
26. Nora V. Daza, Galing-galing: First Philippine Cookbook for Use in the United States (Manila: Carnation Philippines, 1974); Christ the King Parish Guild, Favorite Recipes (Kansas City, MO: Circulation Services, 1968); Buckley School, Buckley’s Best (Sherman Oaks, CA: Buckley Mothers Club Cookbook Committee, 1973); Los Angeles Times California Cookbook, ed. Betsy Balsley (New York: Abrams, 1981).