You Can't Pin a Good Sinigang Down
Putahe Ng Ina Mo's difficulty sent me on a quest to understand the significance of sinigang to the Filipino palate.
It doesn’t sound very impressive, but I’ve now successfully prepared sinigang twice since I took charge of the cooking three months ago. I should say that I do live by myself and have no other metric but my personal satisfaction to appraise my own dishes, but so far, I’ve been surprised—pleased even—at the meals that have come out of my kitchen.
The sinigang in question is a pretty standard bowl of the stuff, which I’d hazard is fine praise for a novice cook living all by his lonesome. I’ll confess that the sinigang mix did most of the heavy lifting, but when you’re in the middle of a pandemic and terrified of strolling down a supermarket aisle, I’m sure the absence of a genuine souring agent in your midday soup can be forgiven. Anyway, it still wouldn’t have been half as good without the other small details helpfully dispensed by my partner via Telegram: simmer, not boil; onions first, leafy greens last. The result, to borrow a local marketing catchphrase, was asim-kilig.
Enter Putahe Ng Ina Mo, a short game about making sinigang that’s repeatedly crushed my newfound confidence in the kitchen. The setup appears simple: prepare the dish using the ingredients in front of you while a crowd of online viewers watches you cook. The catch is, unlike other cooking simulators that you may be used to, this one comes with zero instructions. No recipes. No tutorials. I’ve attempted the dish about ten times by sticking to my recently acquired sinigang instincts, each one unfortunately ending in a puff of dubious smoke and hecklers going wild in the chat.
It sounds harder than it should be because it is. The developers of Putahe Ng Ina Mo intentionally refuse to hold the player’s hand as a reflection of the “mechanics and experiences that we want in video games”. The result is an incredibly elusive sinigang recipe made harder to crack by the absence of any on-screen hints or progress indicators. This experiment also seems to play out like a comedy of errors: vegetables with jiggly physics skitter about at the slightest touch, a chorus of squeaking voices announces the name of each ingredient you pick up, and a tune that reminds me of a sad trombone plays repeatedly in the background.
I know I’m new to the kitchen, but it’s common knowledge that there’s more than one way to prepare sinigang. In fact, you can’t make many Filipino dishes without inviting comparisons to their regional variants, whether we’re talking staples like adobo, pancit, ensalada, or lechon. It’s the reason why Twitter loves taking up arms against gatekeepers with takes that ignore the diversity of Filipino cuisine. So rather than be baited by Putahe Ng Ina Mo’s intentional difficulty, I stopped playing and tried to understand what makes sinigang a dish so impossible to confine.
One of the earliest mentions of sinigang in literature comes from no less than Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere during a fishing trip with Ibarra, Maria Clara, and their companions. Here, Rizal describes in detail a soup base prepared with rice water and soured with kamias:
“Naghanda ng húgas-bigas, mga camatis at camìas…Linilinis ng mga dalaga ang mga talbós ng calabaza, hiníhimay ang mga patánì at pinapuputolputol ang mga paayap ng casinghahabà ng cigarrillo.”1
Later, Tia Isabel would give instructions to add fresh prawns to the pot collected from the nearby fish pen in the lake. Of course, seafood is only one of many meat options at our disposal today, which also include pork, beef, fish, and chicken—the last one normally steeped in a simmering stew of tamarind leaves.
We owe the wealth of ingredients that go well with sinigang to the geography of the Philippines, which has shaped our cooking long before the Spaniards invaded our shores. Historian and food critic Doreen Fernandez argues that this sour dish, and not the quintessential adobo, is most representative of the Filipino palate:
“It is adaptable to all tastes (if you don’t like shrimp, then bangus, or pork), to all classes and budgets (even ayungin, in humble little piles, find their way into the pot), to seasons and availability (walang talong, mahal ang gabi? kangkong na lang!).”2
This versatility of taste and texture rises from our unremitting relationship with rice, which acts as a neutralizing canvas for the flavors in our cooking. When paired with sinigang, each plate of rice becomes a stage for the “galaxy of gulay” that grows abundantly in our lands, Fernandez notes. For the “dietarily uninhibited Filipino,” she says, every root, leaf, tendril, fruit, flower, and lowly weed “comes into use, its flavor evoked by steaming, boiling, salting, combining.”
Putahe Ng Ina Mo’s souring agent of choice is, not surprisingly, a packet of sinigang mix. Each time you dispense the powder into the pot, a cheeky voice goes shik-shik-shik. The last time I had a sip of homemade sinigang soup that wasn’t artificially flavored must’ve been over a decade ago when I still lived with my dad in Bulacan. He’d collect the leaves and fruit of a tamarind tree growing over our roof for some sinampalukang manok, or pluck some low-hanging guava from our front yard if he felt like having some sinigang sa bayabas.
While there’s a clear argument to be had against using flavored mixes over natural souring ingredients, it’s really just a token of the convenience that we Filipinos have grown accustomed to over the decades. According to Fernandez, if our native tastes were shaped by the landscape, then our desire for convenience was shaped by our American colonizers, who brought with them “pressure cookers and freezers, pre-cooking and instant cooking, supermarkets, and fastfood.”
Still, the imagination we possess for authentic souring agents is something we continue to hold close to our identity. Fernandez enumerates:
“Instead, one uses mashed sampalok or kamias; guavas or green pineapple; alibangbang leaves or the tenderly green sampaloc leaves and flowers; batuan or tomatoes; or combinations of these and other sour fruits that different regions know and prefer.”
And oh, how plentiful these sinigang varieties are. Not counting the “classics” that use common proteins and souring agents, we have versions with watermelon, miso, santol, green mango, ube, coconut water, and my favorite: an Ilonggo hybrid called kansi that’s one-part sinigang and one-part bulalo.
You could even argue that the making of a Filipino dish does not end in the kitchen. The participatory nature of Filipino eating is expressed by Carmen Guerrero-Nakpil in the essay Where’s The Patis? when she said, “By adjusting the sauce, the eater partakes in the cooking.” By concocting our individual saucers of sawsawan, the final version of a Filipino dish rests entirely on the diner’s personal preferences. Perhaps this is where Ang Putahe Ng Ina Mo does right by our dining traditions, but instead of helpings of sili’t patis to fix my abysmal cooking, I’m subjected to a barrage of salty comments pouring out of the chat.
On its itch.io page, you’ll find that the developers have hilariously marked Putahe Ng Ina Mo as a survival game, a genre typically reserved for titles that offer unsympathetic environments and harsh resource management systems. It’s especially funny to me because that’s what sinigang is: the culmination of a culinary identity influenced by our predecessors’ survivalist tendencies in a diverse land.
“These dishes,” Fernandez muses, “show the Filipino’s understanding of the potential of his surroundings, his imaginative exploration into nature, his instinctive sensitivity to nuances of combination, contrast and accompaniment.”
I continue to mess up Putahe Ng Ina Mo’s elusive sinigang recipe. Meanwhile, in my own kitchen, I continue to whip up approximations of dishes using what I can forage from my pantry and fridge. Perhaps, out of this constricted life created by the pandemic, new versions of this sour stew will arise and enter the collective Filipino cookbook’s pages. These days in particular, I’ve learned that it’s less about following definitive recipes to the letter and more about making a dish sing with the ingredients handed to you in the moment.
Putahe Ng Ina Mo is free to play on itch.io, with a downloadable version available for $1. Because it’s a prototype, expect a very short experience and some unintended hiccups.
From Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere, translated by Pascual H. Poblete.
From Doreen Fernandez’ Why Sinigang?, archived by the Ateneo de Manila University.