Tita Nette

Commonly called arroz caldo, this dish is widely known in the Philippines with various regional names, although “Goto is what we called it growing up,” Tita Nette said. This recipe is but one variation of it, and it can also have tripe, pig intestines, and more. It is essentially rice in broth with chicken, and a flavoring of lemongrass and ginger. 

When my friend Emma had her wisdom teeth out, she couldn’t eat anything but mashed potatoes and chocolate pudding. Worried for her nutritional health, I made her miso soup. Unfortunately, it wasn’t very filling. When I learned to make goto, I recalled that miserable month, and wished that I could have made this for her then. 

Filipino Food in America

ABBY: What is Filipino food to you?

TITA NETTE:  I think my thought about food is just to sustain me. But when it’s a special food when you get together as a family, it’s very instrumental to us being together. Food itself for me is nothing but… it’s like drinking water. I don’t love it or hate it.

ABBY:  What if someone asked you to describe Filipino food?

TITA NETTE: Filipino food is very tedious. A lot of chopping, it’s not like American food. That’s why I gravitate to [American food], you put them in a casserole, you put them in the oven and cook. You stand over the stove to cook food [in Filipino food]. It’s a very difficult thing to do. It’s a chore, it’s not easy. I like the fact that we can make casserole [here]. If you notice, we’ve been standing over the stove here. In all that amount of time, I can just have a turkey in the oven, a casserole in the oven, you see what I’m saying? 

ABBY: Is there any food that you enjoy cooking?

TITA NETTE: I think dessert! Enjoy cooking? I just enjoy entertaining. Cooking I don’t enjoy, I enjoy it if you guys are coming. That’s the difference. Am I complicated or what? Maybe you caught me in a different time in my life, maybe when I was younger… times have changed though. I don’t romanticize food like I used to. Maybe when I was young and David [her son, now moved out] is around, but I have changed, I noticed that. I don’t look forward to…

ABBY:  What about eating?

TITA NETTE:  I don’t know… It’s not as a priority as it used to be. It changed. It cycled. Before it’s, I’m having cravings for this, it just seems that that’s not there anymore. Maybe things have changed for me? I don’t know. But what I do like is, whatever it is we’re eating we’re together. So I look forward to that.

ABBY:  Yeah, you usually host family holidays.

TITA NETTE:  Yeah, that’s what I look forward to, of course then I enjoy eating it. Maybe I just changed. I just became so complicated. I didn’t have lunch…I had yogurt and cereal. 

TITA NETTE: The most thing that I cook is just fried. Fried fish, fried pork. Or sinigang, nilaga, that’s the kind of food we eat. The menudo is for special occasions. 

ABBY: Adobo for special occasions?

TITA NETTE: Yeah, like I said, you have to get meat.

ABBY: I noticed that everyone is making soup.

TITA NETTE: Yeah, because that’s how you extend your meat. But my favorite though… my mother used to make the paella different. She makes a bomba rice too, she put coconut oil and chicken and all that, she does that for the holidays, I remember that. I know the culture, we don’t have that much. I think I can speak for it, there’s not very many… I’m sure your mom too doesn’t know how to cook anymore.

ABBY: Yeah, that’s part of why I’m doing this… I don’t know how to cook any of the Filipino food and she doesn’t either.

TITA NETTE:  Yeah, remember she was young when coming here too, 22 or 21, we didn’t grow up like you. You’re very worldly, you travelled… we have no idea about things, about life. All we know is what’s around us. But we made it here, you know, so. 

Cooking in the Philippines

ABBY: Do you have any memories associated with [goto]? What does goto remind you of, what does it mean to you?

TITA NETTE:  I don’t… you know… You’re asking me, I feel like I’m a dud… for some reason, I don’t have anything. I’m trying to remember. 

ABBY: You don’t have to–

TITA NETTE:  No, I don’t feel bad. I don’t… I don’t remember, I don’t remember anything that I did. All I remember are a few snippets of my life in the Philippines. Isn’t that weird? I don’t remember anything that’s pleasurable. When you tell me, what do you feel when you eat this? I don’t associate it with the Philippines. I associate it with people I’m with, and I don’t remember… I don’t remember! 

ABBY: I think that’s natural that you start to forget some things from very early in your life as you get older.

TITA NETTE:  That’s why it’s good for me, when we get together we talk about what we used to do, the jokes that we had… and I think that’s the problem. We grew up with not really… A friend of mine who was also from the Philippines, she always talked about how this is in her life, and for me I just thought, Oh, I don’t have that memory… 

Tita Nette’s memories of goto are filled with burns, hospital visits, and funerals. The first story she recalled as we cooked was of the burn on her wrist, still faintly visible over fifty years later. 

When I started cooking… I remember being small, I couldn’t even reach. This [burn] right here… what happened is… we don’t really have ovens. Being small, I can’t fry… most of our cooking is done on the stove there. I was supposed to fry milkfish…. You only put wood and there’s no control to slow it down or anything, and we don’t have any mitts to hold it. What happened is I was putting oil and it was already boiling and maybe I wasn’t ready, and it was just so hot. So my spatula and the fish, like this, but the fish fell… and that’s so many years ago. And I just burned this one thing and it hurt so bad, it bubbled up just like that. Looking back … it was such a hard life there, I think that’s why we appreciate everything in here. 

During our session, she showed me how to cut chicken wings into thirds by cutting through the joints. She urged me to be careful and cut cautiously. She remembered when her mother, my Lola, would whack the chicken.

“Most people, they just whack it. That’s dangerous if you’re not good at it. Your mom got a cut like that – she did that on a coconut, you can’t. And her hand was right there. I was there when she did that.  I think I was able to whack it, but… We all have accidents of our own. Tita Mimi, I remember, she was trying to sew clothes, she sew her own fingers in the sewing machine… I mean your mom… was trying to open up a coconut and she had her fingers there and she cut her fingers and there was a big gush. And Tita Julie…”

Cooking did not only happen in the kitchen. There were the trips to the palengke with Lola, once or twice a week, taking the tricycle to the market in the middle of the night to catch the stalls as they opened at 2am and avoid the rush. Lola would take the younger children with her, while the older ones were busy with housework and school. Tita Nette would get sweet desserts at the market: ube, suman, and binatog, her favorite – soaked corn topped with coconut strips and salt. Her mother’s hand securely in her own, breathing in the humid night air as it mingled with the salty coconut of her treat. Years later, as a mother herself, Tita Nette would often make trips to the grocery store at the same time of night, while her husband and son were asleep. After working evenings at the hospital, she would go straight to the grocery store and finally return home around 3am to sleep. 

But cooking was also in the backyard, hacking away at the neck of a chicken. Her memories of cooking blended with the trip to the hospital on Christmas Eve, squinting at the streetlights in the night, which turned into soft afternoon light and peaches hitting the ground. 

“Even now, I’m very sensitive about chicken. I do kill chicken, I did remember, beheading chicken, that one I remember. One Christmas Eve I was chasing ducks to cook, see that we’ll do adobo for ducks, for some reason that’s cheaper [than chicken], I chase around the ducks to cook for Christmas. Unfortunately I step on a nail, a big nail, I end up in the hospital because I develop tetanus, for a long time I was at home, I must really be sick… See what you remember as a kid? I remember my mother and father driving me, it’s gotta be the hospital, I’m laying down in the truck, and then I could see the lights. It must be night when they were taking me to the hospital, and then I was off school for a long time.

After the hospital, she was bedridden for a while. Out of that haze comes one memory of the mabolo tree, which she likens to a peach. When the mabolo fruit was ripe and red, it would fall to the ground, and she could hear the thump from her room. In bandages and unable to walk, she listened to the fruit hit the ground outside. But everyone else was at school, and she was the only one home, the first one to be aware of the fruit outside, ready to be scooped up and eaten. “I run… see, I remember that! I run to get the fruit off the ground before someone else gets it!” 

The image of the mabolo lingers in my mind. The thread of hunger runs through every story I’ve heard today, and I can only imagine how it felt to listen to the wet sound of the lush and decadent fruit hit the ground, knowing she couldn’t get out of bed. The sweet and rotten smell of fruit as it slowly goes bad, wafting through the window of a bedridden girl whose siblings were all at school. Finally, a yard full of fruit all for her. But still, she couldn’t walk. I imagine that it must have been days, days of watching her siblings come home from school and swarm the yard to pick up all the fruit, and being unable to move, days after Christmas until she felt strong enough to get up. Determined and bandaged, she pulled herself up out of bed, and ran. That’s the part that she remembers the most. How freeing it must have felt, to run despite the pain, and finally be able to get the fruit that had fallen so tantalizingly outside her window, with no one to take it from her. 

ABBY: You had a dog?

TITA NETTE: Yeah we do. But they’re outside, they’re not pets like … We give them food, whatever scraps we have because we don’t have food either. She’ll have four children and they’ll grow up together. 

ABBY: What was the dog’s name?

TITA NETTE:  Milky! That’s all I remember is Milky.

ABBY: So you named her Milky, like in English?

TITA NETTE: Yeah, for some reason, because she’s white, we called her Milky. I don’t think we named the other dog. I don’t remember naming the other dog. It’s not something that we do. But for some reason we have that one dog. She just lives underneath the stairs. I know. Life in the Philippines. I’m sure it’s different in different countries too… It’s a little… not the same. Being a child, you look at it differently too, maybe my mother looked at it differently too. 

We pivot back to the meal after Lamby has finished eating and her mouth and ears have been carefully cleaned. 

ABBY: When did you usually make this dish? My mom said, you should ask Tita Nette to make this because she’s really good at it.

TITA NETTE:  You know, see how memory differs, I don’t remember making them but I know how to make it so I must have. I tried to bury any memory I have of the Philippines… I don’t remember any of my friends, I don’t have any friends. I don’t remember anybody I grew up with because I grew up with my sisters and that’s really all my life is. I probably… I have no… You might find it kind of different, I have no allegiance to the country. I know it’s sad, because all I remember is how poor we were, we were always looking in at the people who have… we’re the have nots. It’s so painful… but it helped us. I always just look at my mother, I feel like she’s always begging for money, because when her husband died, she has nothing. Her family’s poor too, we have nothing. My story is not just me, all the neighbors are poor, there’s a few and far between but not a whole lot. We have nothing. That’s why I’m very lucky to be here. It’s all in the miracles that Lola asked for that we were able to be saved and be here. 

Lolo died when Lola was 52 years old. They were married when she was seventeen and he was twenty-seven. She had twelve children, one after the other. Tita Nette commented, “I was pregnant one time and you thought the whole world is uh… so fricking dramatic.” She recounted Lola’s life: sleeping three hours a day and spending the rest of her time as a housewife caring for her ever-increasing brood. As one of the older children, Tita Nette was recruited to help. Meanwhile, Lolo was a travelling merchant. He took a jeep to remote reaches of the island, selling commodities like salt and pepper, vegetable oil, and vinegar, to people who might have otherwise not been able to access them. He also sold seasonal goods, such as pakwan, or watermelon. “ I remember when he was alive, when Mimi was small, pakwan seeds, he will open them with a little hammer, hand it to Mimi when she was a baby, she would eat the seeds. We eat the seeds, but you have to remove the shell. It’s just like a pumpkin seed, except the watermelon seed is a little harder.”

Once, he took Tita Nette with him. They went to Tarlac, into the mountains to sell to the Ifugao people. “My father was very proud: “Oh yeah, this is my daughter, she goes to school!” I remember that. But that’s when he was alive.” 

When he died, Lola had no source of income. By this time, Tita Angie, the oldest sister, had already come to the United States. A chemist by trade, she was the first one to leave the Philippines. As we cooked, Tita Nette informed me that today was Lolo’s death anniversary. 

TITA NETTE: Actually it’s his death anniversary today. He died 4 o clock in the afternoon.

ABBY: I guess it’s fitting that we’re making goto, like a funeral dish.

TITA NETTE: Yeah. 

ABBY: So at his funeral, did you make this?

TITA NETTE: I’m sure they did. I think it was over a five days funeral because we were expecting Tita Lina, Tita Angie to come, but she didn’t. It was hard on her. 

ABBY: Did you ever make goto for a funeral?

TITA NETTE: Yeah, I’m sure we did.

ABBY: You personally, I mean.

TITA NETTE: Oh, no. You have to remember, my father and my mother they’re very protective. We were not allowed to just… Other people can just go places, we were just… we’re like, you know, cloistered at home, we don’t participate in all those kinds of things.

ABBY: Was that normal for the Philippines, or something different about your family?

TITA NETTE: It’s just something different about us. My parents are very strict growing up. No difference from how you [are] here… there’s no such thing as parties, we don’t go to parties, there’s no invitation for us anywhere, all we do is go to school and go do some work at home. Do laundry, do iron, do clean the house, clean the perimeter… nothing special. 

ABBY: It sounds like you were pretty busy. 

TITA NETTE: Yeah, really there’s nothing else to do. 

ABBY: Did you do games for fun?

TITA NETTE: Yeah, we do pretend, we go around the backyard, we play cooking with mud, we climb trees… I just don’t remember a whole lot. I don’t remember any of that. All I remember is just…[She trails off.]

Editor's Note

Tita Nette’s session caused me to reconsider my project, something that would continue to develop especially as I read Halo-Halo Ecologies. Somehow, I expected to get a few stories about times that she ate the dish and learn a bit more about the Philippines. Instead, I got a rich tapestry of experiences and memories that complicated the simple story I thought I would hear. 

To Tita Nette, being Filipino is not being proud of the Philippines, or a fond reminiscence on childhood. It is certainly not cooking Filipino food. Cooking, for her, is a perfunctory act of survival. Rather, the value lies in being able to share food among family, to feed as many as you can, and to provide a home where everyone can come together. I think of all the parties in her house and the extravagant Christmas decorations, the kitchen full of food with all of us gathered for the meal, a hub of activity and togetherness. Like Lola leading her daughter to the market in the small hours of the morning, Tita Nette drove herself to the grocery store in the dead of night to prepare for our family parties. Perhaps the quiet reminded her of her childhood. 

Her past is hard to recall, both because of the distance from the memories and the pain they represent. Stories from her childhood are littered with injuries and chores, interspersed with hazy and imprecise moments of peace. Did she hear the mabolo fruit drop while she was recovering from tetanus, or did she tack on the memory to soften the experience? She says she was unable to walk, then she ran outside to get the fruit. How long was there between when she listened to the fruit hit the ground, and when she ran outside? At Lolo’s funeral, what did she eat?

The most interesting discrepancy, to me, is the association of goto with funerals. I have asked several other family members, and none of them carry this same association. Yet, Tita Nette was adamant that this association existed, although she could not recall an instance of goto at a funeral. Perhaps cooking goto, the food of sickness and recovery, is a kind of grief. Without the veneer of “pinoy pride,” perhaps all that is left is a funeral and rotting fruit on the ground with no one to pick it up. Perhaps the only difference between Filipino and American food is the ease of preparation, and like Tita Nette, I should not afford it any particular significance and instead focus on the present. Work hard and get what you want, she says, and she has lived it.