Before the West took vocal interest in the vibrant cuisine of the Philippines, Fernandez was writing articles in the Manila Chronicle and the Philippine Daily Inquirer showing Filipinos that even their daily food deserved reverential, historical treatment. Treating Filipino food as what it was—a cuisine—was a revolutionary act, Mishan wrote in the Times last year in a memorial of the writer, scholar, teacher, and historian who died in 2002. In that piece, the paper's former food editor Raymond Sokolov called Fernandez "the most impressive food writer and historian I ever encountered.""I think of her as the most pivotal figure of Philippine gastronomy."
To learn about French food, one reads Julia Child; Italian food, Marcella Hazan; Indian food, Madhur Jaffrey. To understand Filipino food, one should read Doreen Fernandez, whose work can enlighten ancestral history for the diaspora and explain the foundations of the cuisine for readers outside it. Despite the reputation that precedes her, finding Fernandez's work internationally is a challenge. Tikim isn't her only book on food—there was Sarap in 1988 and Palayok in 2000—but it is the most well-known. After its first printing in 1994, the Philippines-based Anvil Publishing has reprinted Tikim five times since, most recently in 2019. That reissue, with Mishan's piece now quoted on the back, can be found in bookstores in the Philippines or ordered online by local shoppers for 299 pesos, or about $6.17. But intermittently out of print and until recently, published and sold only in the Philippines, Tikim is incredibly rare in the American market, despite the size of the Filipino population and the growing interest in Filipino food. Before Anvil's recent reprint, I'd seen online sellers list copies from $300 to $500; listings on Amazon currently range from $130 to $230. Even the reissue is pricey because without large-scale American distribution, sellers who've gotten hold of the book piecemeal price it at a premium: currently between $79 and $99 on various sites that ship to the United States. The WorldCat library catalog lists Tikim's print availability in 48 libraries worldwide.
As much as Manalansan admires Fernandez, people initially underestimated the value of her work, he said. Food writing—particularly in its most common forms—has a reputation, at times, as a pursuit focused solely on chasing pleasure, but Fernandez's approach was journalistic, anthropological, and ethnographic. She offered a framework of cuisine that paved the way for people like Mananlansan, who wanted to think about food and culture with a critical, contextual eye. By thinking about how food becomes "Filipino," Fernandez saw cuisine as a negotiated process. "It’s a product of people trying to struggle with what’s available, with their own limitations, the environment, what the government [and] the economic conditions will allow, and how tastes actually are not intrinsic to people living in one location," Manalansan said. "She writes about food, but she does not fall into the fetishization of it—the way a fetish is like this one singular object that you imbue with very specific powers that don’t change." Fernandez's vision of food was dynamic: Though she understood Filipino cuisine's history, she also had an eye towards its future."She writes about food, but she does not fall into the fetishization of it."
I didn't get my copy of Tikim until 2020, when the online store Filipino Food Crawl began selling limited quantities of Anvil's reissue. I winced when I bought it for $69, but now, as one of its admirers, I understand the pull to pass on what I can of Fernandez's work. Though she's inspired many writers, nothing beats the original material, and though there might be denser texts on these topics in the Philippines, if they exist, they're even harder to find.
When Manila-based baker and food writer Chino Cruz started working at the food magazine Yummy, he decided that in order to take food writing seriously, he needed to read Fernandez. "I was like, I'm a big fan of food writing in general, but all my references are American, so there's John Birdsall and Ruth Reichl, but there was never really a Filipina or Filipino to pull from," Cruz said. Though he attended Ateneo de Manila University, where Fernandez taught, he regrets that he didn't matriculate until after she died."She wanted—and a lot of us want—regular Filipinos to find the specialness of Filipino food rather than it being purely pedestrian."
Ceniza Choy knew food was essential to understanding Filipino culture and history: one she barely saw reflected in her American education. Fernandez's research cemented histories missing from the American canon, and her view of food through its cultural, historical, familial, and social contexts resonated with Ceniza Choy. The book renewed her appreciation for the experiences and relationships she had as a second-generation Filipino American, born and raised around the immigrant community of New York City."It's about the people who prepare the food with love and care, and not just the food that's prepared at a highbrow restaurant."
While her contemporaries were tracing "bourgeois restaurant culture" to highlight modernization, Fernandez suggested that "especially if you're working class, marginalized, poor, rural, and indigenous in the Philippines, you're at the heart of the world-making that becomes appropriated as Philippine cuisine," De Leon said. His work today explores Filipino history from the point of view of the indigenous people of Northern Luzon, the country's largest island—in doing so, he centers those whom history has often excluded from the national image of the Philippines."I couldn't believe that this book wasn't everywhere."
Between 1995 and 2018, Ceniza Choy didn't think consciously about Fernandez's work though she admired it as she worked on her book, Empire of Care, published in 2003. That changed in 2018 when, as a professor at Berkeley, Ceniza Choy invited educator, activist, and cook Aileen Suzara to give a talk about food to students in her Asian American history course."I talked to her class and included some quotes from Tikim because it talks about: How do you retrace your food roots?" Suzara said. As a natural chef, former farmer, and member of the Filipino diaspora, Suzara has always felt a longing to be more connected to land and to recover cultural foodways. When she found a copy of Tikim on a visit to the Philippines around 2009, it weaved together threads she'd drawn out around understanding ancestral spirit and connecting resistance and food. "I couldn't believe that this book wasn't everywhere," she said. Holding that documentation in her hands was a reminder of legacy: "I think that [for] all of us doing any of our work, whether we're completely aware of it or not, someone has made the path forward."
De Leon still takes issue with Tikim's current availability though. Hardcover and with small print, Brill's edition seems to him like a text for libraries and academic instutions, as opposed to the paperback version that could be read by anyone, anywhere. "I think the actual material history and the material politics of where [Tikim and Sarap] have gone is precisely the problem," he said. His ideal would be to see the books at $15 to $20 each, so a broad American audience could have access to them, too. And, as Santos said, finding Fernandez's books through libraries requires a knowledge of interlibrary loan systems that can prevent "the average tita and lola" from just asking for them.
Tikim's historical yet accessible approach to Filipino food remains unmatched by options in the American market. Though new cookbooks—like Miguel Trinidad and Nicole Ponseca's I Am Filipino, published in 2018—incorporate historical information, specialized culinary histories remain rare. "Part of it is that people have to buy them," Sartwell of Kitchen Arts & Letters told me last year. "I think, to be quite frank about it, it's the kind of thing where a lot of people feel like, oh my god, of course, this is so wonderful, what a great idea, it should exist—but they don't support it with their money." The bookstore finally got Tikim this month, with the help of a local entrepreneur looking to raise awareness of Filipino food in the US. Sales have been "modest out of the gate," Sartwell said, because the book is priced at $80. On this point, the shop's listing is apologetic: "There is no denying that the price, reflecting not only a small print run but the costs of importing the book from more than 13,000 kilometers away, is higher than we would like. […] However, we felt we simply had to offer this book."The American food landscape is broadening its horizons, but the long held baseline of Eurocentric culture and familiarity is still the axis on which it all turns. Nuanced and specialized stories about global food are easily written off as "too niche" as food media positions itself as always introducing new cultures to this particular, myopic perspective. Though interest in these deep dives is fervent in certain circles, it's still a small market, lowering the value proposition for publishers who have overhead costs to offset. The stories the publishing system deems valuable, as a result, are the ones with financial value. But it's a circular problem: "It's often the case that specialized books don't have obvious predecessors in the way that a book on, say, Instant-Pots or soup might," Sartwell said this year. "So publishers can't make direct comparisons and are thus reluctant to take a risk. Which means that they don't ever have obvious predecessors for comparison, and don't ever take the risks.""Publishers can't make direct comparisons and are thus reluctant to take a risk."
Despite the challenges, it's true that Tikim is more accessible today than it has been in a long time. Having benefited from Fernandez's commitment to Filipino food and culture, several of the scholars I talked to saw passing on her work as a responsibility: If it meant so much to them, then what could it mean for others in the diaspora, and how could it enrich the understanding of people outside the culture?Just as Fernandez saw cuisine shifting in response to social and historical contexts, the way readers can experience her work now—and what it can inspire—are also dynamic. "To continue her work means to think, to critically interpret what her work was in the first place," said De Leon. Through Tikim, Fernandez shaped a new understanding of culture, and the work she started isn't over—it continues as long as people continue to find the path she helped establish. "For those who have not read something like Doreen in their lives, what will [reading it] plant in them, or what are the questions it will spark?" Suzara said. "I really want to see ways that people are going to reconnect to that writing and that viewpoint, find ways to make it real for themselves, and to look a totally different way."Follow Bettina Makalintal on Twitter."For those who have not read something like Doreen in their lives, what will [reading it] plant in them, or what are the questions it will spark?"