Description
by: Honesto C.General
This is a fun book disguised as a cookbook. It is a brief autobiography with a rather extended digression on food.
In a few pages, Mr. Honesto C. General- Ning to his Bicolano friends- writes retrospectively about a three-year segment of his life as a teenager during the war, suddenly without the househelp that he and his family had been accustomed to. Four pages deceptively entitled “Preface” encapsule his origins, his upbringing and, in a few splashes of color, set him in the world many of us lived in-Bicol.
The succeeding pages as well as the Acknowledgements and the dedication of this book to his parents tell us about how Ning thinks and how he relates to people and things around him. That he is an insurance man who also writes a column about the country in relation to insurance only accentuates the author as a person.
Incidentally, the recipes in these pages are authentic and truly edible-in fact, epicurean. Ning has captured the lightheartedness and the familiarity one must have with food, something perhaps akin to how the French supposedly rhapsodize about their wines-except that Bicolanos do not rhapsodize. Bicolanos only look up in a narrow-eyed delight as the gata flavors through their tastebuds, soothing the sting of the labuyo on their tongues and, enhancing the delights of laing, or of the crab or fish which completes the dish.
To some, it might be a delight that unsettles the conscience, perhaps even suggesting something sinful.
Happily, Ning’s recipes in this book guarantee that delight with no fear from the Board of Cencors nor from their father confessors.
Copyright 1994 ISBN 971-569-150-1
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