Dishes of Disasters

HERE IN BICOL, typhoons were more frequent around the early days of November, just after everyone had gone home from the cemeteries for the All Souls' Day. The storms came with winds rough enough to tear into useless strips fans of banana leaves, which Mother would use to wrap latik or inun'on na dilis. The storms would bring rains that came in torrents of sharp needles so that children and even adults could not go out of the houses. Sometimes rain would come in strong outpours that left the rice fields and farms flooded for few days.

After every tempest, when electricity would be absent for few days, the skies would go miraculously spotless; perhaps a lot more clearer than skies of midsummer. The trees were left without foliage and all television antennas were unsurprisingly torn down. This clarity of the heavens became more beautiful in the evenings, especially in twilights when ethereal colors would instill among every one of us a certain kind of hope after a malediction. By this time, there would surely be tendrils of smoke rising from every household. These wisps of smoke would go astray to wander and permeate everywhere so that the whole village would in turn become scented with a blend of aromas of life-sustaining home dishes known to each Bikolano as duma.

Duma is our term for dishes eaten during and in the aftermath of disasters-which in Bicol would always be the typhoons. In some places, dumas are cooked in the simplest process of boiling, grilling, frying or blanching. In some, dumas are done out of pre-typhoon leftovers or anything salvaged after the rage. On the other hand, the chef in my mother does it a la haute cuisine.

Before storms, Mother was always prepared with her usual fares of ingredients that would last even without the preserving power of the fridge. In her basket, I would usually find dried and smoked fish, eggs, some cuts of meat, her usual spices like garlic, onions, ginger, and other typhoon things like candles and batteries for the flash light and transistor radio. She would also have around half a kilo of pulután (glutinous rice) and a few slabs of tablea which excited me very much as a kid.

When typhoon Monang came in 1993, it hit Bicol at nighttime. It was undoubtedly destructive and the rains left Lupi in the second deepest flood in its history as a town.

Sometime between terrifying gusts, I told Mother-it was almost a question, "Ma, there's a train coming."

She replied almost inaudibly among the deafening howls of the winds, "It's the storm."

And then she hushed me to sleep.

Bright morning arrived and Mother greeted us with a hot champorado matched with grilled bolínao or dried mackerel. If to be matched with champorado, Mother always had the dried fish grilled, never fried. I never found out why.

Mother's champorado was always enriched by coconut milk that thickens the mixture and thereafter allows cocoa and the sweetener to leach evenly through the porridge. Thus, there was a feast despite the storm the previous evening. Everyone knew the porridge was just the appetizer-or it could just be the soup-in Mother's full course menu. The entrée is yet to come. By the time breakfast ended, the grown-ups had just too much work to do, too much garbage to clean up.

At around ten in the morning when our front yard was a heap of retrieved materials ranging from galvanized iron to broken glass bottles, Mother asked me to pick the freshest and youngest of the cassava leaves from her small garden that, thanks to the heavens, was spared by Monang. When I came back, she asked me to grate-manually, of course-a head of coconut already cut into halves.