[Sca-cooks] Taillevent is Alive And Well and Living In -- Manila???

[Susan Lin]

"that the dark red, slightly oily sauce on the table is not in fact chili
paste, but still quite powerful and made, I suspect, from dried shrimp"

I think that might have been baggaong (spelling could be off) - it is indeed
a sauce made from tiny tiny brine shrimp.  I remember eating it in the
Philippines with green mango when I lived there as an exchange student way
back when.

I'm sorry your first experience with Filipino food was a disappointment.  I
love it and I love pansit (which has always been made with rice vermicelli
noodles as far as I know).  My favorite has to be banana pie - made with
wonderful bananas (not like banana cream pie - more like an apple pie but
with bananas).  I've tried to replicate it many times here but we just don't
have the same kind of bananas.

Keep trying - I"m sure you'll find lots of stuff you like.  I"ll cautioni
you about ballut though - you might like it but I could never bring myself
to eat it.

Happy exploring.

Shoshanna

On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 7:25 AM, Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius <
adamantius1 at verizon.net> wrote:

> Hullo, the list!
>
> There's a Filipino bakery/cafe/restaurant in my neighborhood, and we had
> dinner there last night, which was interesting. On a prior occasion this
> place managed to sort of strike out with me, presenting me with what was
> probably my first negative experience with an Asian cuisine: I discovered I
> really don't like the noodle called pancit (which, in this instance at
> least, was an alleged rice noodle almost thick enough to have been squeezed
> from a pastry bag, and quite... wobbly?), that the dark red, slightly oily
> sauce on the table is not in fact chili paste, but still quite powerful and
> made, I suspect, from dried shrimp, and that a little stewed oxtail and beef
> tripe (both of which I normally love) goes a very long way when served in
> peanut sauce. I was convinced, though, that we had simply ordered stuff we
> didn't happen to care for, and not that the cuisine or the restaurant was to
> blame, so last night we went back for another try.
>
> Last night we stuck mostly to pig bits, including an appetizer made from
> chopped pork belly and [probably] ears, highly seasoned and frizzled up with
> mass quantities of onion and garlic, and served in a sizzling iron pan with
> a raw egg cracked onto it just before serving.
>
> Then there was the entertaining spectacle of my spouse, who is small,
> delicate, and usually fairly refined, just ripping into an unabashedly
> deep-fried pig's foot and knuckle larger than her head. Yes, this place is
> not for people with heart ailments, and they do indeed serve deep-fried pork
> fat, essentially cracklings, with a dipping sauce as an appetizer -- whether
> this constitutes evidence of an advanced civilization, well, I suppose one
> could argue either way. Maybe we'll try that one next time.
>
> Well, anyway, the Evil Spawn, being just a bit of a wuss in some respects
> where food is concerned, and viewing the various feet and ears with deep
> concern, stuck to the more garden-variety barbecued pork from the more
> respectable parts of the pig.
>
> But it's okay -- they got him anyway. They served it with a small dish of a
> dipping sauce which looked familiar to me, but which I couldn't place
> immediately. It was good, sort of sweet, sour, hot and bitter all at once.
> People who try it often seem to feel the same way: that the ingredients turn
> them off a bit, but that it's surprisingly good and that they can almost no
> longer conceive of proper roast pork being served without it.
>
> It turns out that the main ingredients are toasted bread crumbs soaked in
> vinegar, lots of black pepper, fried onion and garlic optional, a pinch of
> sugar, and, of course, a healthy dollop of grilled liver, chopped, ground or
> pureed into the sauce.
>
> I just got to thinking how many medieval European sauces were largely the
> same thing, and wondering about how this might have occurred.
>
> Adamantius [wondering what we'll do with The Banana Custard Cake From Hell
> which followed us home like a large, unruly dog... will we have to give it
> its own room?]
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> "Most men worry about their own bellies, and other people's souls, when we
> all ought to worry about our own souls, and other people's bellies."
>                        -- Rabbi Israel Salanter
>
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