How Food Writing Without a Recipe Inspired Me to Write Cookbooks

I spent my summers as a child making mango jam with my mother when I lived in the Philippines. There was no end to the mangoes that had to be peeled, mashed, squashed into a thick pulp. It was mom’s guidance that taught me to appreciate this tropical fruit and a love for cooking. Monica Bhide, my writing teacher and a best-selling author urged me to write an essay on the process.

I took her advice and scribbled a few lines. Then, with much regret, I stopped writing. I told Monica “I can’t write the essay. I forgot to ask Mom for the recipe.”

My writing teacher suggested “Write about your regret. Write about the experience, how you felt and what you saw.” I resumed writing. I wrote about my remorse for letting the years go by and never asking Mom for the mango jam recipe.

I finished the mango jam essay and shoved it in a drawer. The essay about making mango jam with my mother, Lourdes stayed hidden a long time. I never submitted the essay to major media publications. I was unsure. Who would want to read about an outdated method of cooking mango jam in a third world country, which had no recipe to begin with, I asked myself.

I mustered the courage to submit my mango jam essay to the Doreen G. Fernandez Food Writing Awards in Manila in the spring of 2012. The late Doreen G. Fernandez was my hero and the doyenne of Philippine food writing. I used to help my Mom clip Doreen’s newspaper columns from the popular daily newspaper The Manila Chronicle and I pasted them on Mom’s recipe scrapbook.

The activity brought me closer to Mom. We read Doreen’s writings together, while Mom gave me advice on food, family and love. My essay A Hundred Mangoes in a Bottle went on to win two food writing awards for journalism excellence – the Doreen G. Fernandez Food Writing Awards in 2012 and the Plaridel Awards from the Philippine-American Press Club in San Francisco, California in 2013. Overjoyed, I knew Mom’s spirit was in every word I wrote about forgetting to get her recipe.

The mango jam recipe remained elusive though. No matter how many mangoes I had, how sweet they were, how ripe or how plump the fruit, I could never replicate the mango jam the way Mom did it.

One day, after a gazillion attempts at stirring, the thick, rich, golden jam finally tasted like Mom’s. I was in my New Jersey home now living in America. I was no longer in Tarlac, the town I grew up in. This time, I did it right. Maybe I used the right copper bottom pot. Or was it the wooden spoon I used? The right temperature? You know what I think? Mom was right there, in spirit, next to me, showing me how to do it. It was the painful longing for her that jabbed at my heart that moment.  

When Mother’s Day comes around, I always recall I never had one with Mom. We never celebrated Mother’s Day in the Philippines which is an American concept and one we only read about or saw in movies. In the Philippines, it was a celebration that came around in the later years (after mom died), brought on by the commercialization of the holiday. I have no regrets, though. We didn’t need Mother’s Day. We had summers of making mango jam. Nothing else made me closer to Mom.

My Mom, Lourdes always wanted to write a cookbook and she told me so. She had a treasure trove of her handwritten recipes in a spiral notebook. She wanted to share her love for cooking with friends and she loved to entertain. But Mom passed away too soon. I mourned her and kept her memory alive through cooking and feeding my family. When we moved to America, my father worried about my well-being. I assured him I was going to be fine because “Mom taught me how to cook.”

Three years ago, while sharing recipes with my blog readers it dawned on me that nearly every dish I cooked and wrote about was my effort to keep Mom in my heart forever. That was when I knew it was time to write a cookbook. I started with a cookbook of popular Filipino dessert recipes because Mom loved desserts. She always wanted meals to have sweet endings and cooked desserts from fruits and produce my dad grew in our farm. I felt an unusual sense of happiness after I published my first cookbook and readers wrote to thank me that they were enjoying my stories and recipes.

Last year, I wrote my second cookbook and dedicated it to my Mom, Lourdes Reyes Besa. It was entitled My Mother’s Philippine Recipes. It’s a special collection of Mom’s favorite traditional Filipino recipes which I have transformed to everyday dishes in my American kitchen.

I wrote this cookbook to demystify the notion that Mom’s cooking is hard to do. Through short anecdotes peppered around the cookbook, I chronicled vivid memories of my mother’s unforgettable cooking during my childhood. The process of writing and publishing my Mom’s recipes in a cookbook affirmed what Mom taught me to never forget: the right ingredients for the best dish starts with love.

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Elizabeth Ann Besa-Quirino is a multi-awarded winner of the Plaridel Writing Awards for best in journalism, given by the Philippine-American Press Club in San Francisco, CA. Her food essay “A Hundred Mangoes in a Bottle” has won a Doreen Gamboa Fernandez Food Writing Award. She was an awardee of the FWN Filipina Women’s Network 100 Most Influential Women of the World in 2013.

Betty Ann, as she is fondly called is a journalist, author, food writer, correspondent and blogs about Filipino home cooking recipes on her popular site Asian in America (www.AsianInAmericaMag.com).

She recently launched her cookbook My Mother’s Philippine Recipes, a collection of her late mother’s favorite Filipino traditional dishes which Betty Ann transformed to everyday cooking in her American kitchen. Other books she has written are How to Cook Philippine Desserts, Cakes and Snacks; Statesman and Survivor Elpidio Quirino, 6th President of the Philippines; and she illustrated Color and Cook Food Coloring Book, an adult coloring book of Filipino food. All books are sold on Amazon.com.

Her writing has been published on Positively Filipino, where she is a correspondent; FOOD Magazine by ABS-CBN Publishing Inc.; Rustan’s Sans Rival Magalogue; and QuirkDIY, Quirk Books Community Blog (Philadelphia, PA). She has made a guest appearance on the TV network KACL-LA 18’s Halo-Halo with Kat Iniba, which aired in California and Hawaii.

Betty Ann is a member of the International Association of Culinary Professionals (NYC) and the Association of Culinary Historians of the Philippines. She is also on the President Elpidio Quirino Foundation Board of Advisors.

Based in New Jersey, USA, Betty Ann travels often to the Philippines and throughout Asia in search of traditional recipes and stories about culture and personalities.

Follow her on Twitter @BettyAnnQuirino

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips