A Filipino-American turned to her grandma for recipes – it’s the moment her ‘true life as a chef’ began
- Chef Angela Dimayuga, trained in European cuisines, turned to her grandma for lessons after she was asked to open a branch of an Asian restaurant in New York
- Her ‘true life as a chef’ began, she writes in Filipinx – Heritage Recipes from the Diaspora, when she realised how sophisticated her culture’s food could be
It took a Filipino galantine, cooked by her lola (grandma) Josefina, and called simply chicken relleno (stuffed chicken), for chef Angela Dimayuga to appreciate that her culture’s food could be as sophisticated as the European cuisines in which she had been trained.
Recruited to open a New York branch of the San Francisco-based Mission Chinese Food, the Filipino-American chef turned to her grandma for lessons.
“This cookbook – and my true life as a chef – began when my lola Josefina decided to entrust me with her recipe for Chicken Relleno,” Dimayuga writes in Filipinx – Heritage Recipes from the Diaspora (2021).
“It was a recipe she shared with no one. Friends who asked were rebuffed and sent off sulking. Even within the family, she kept it a closely guarded secret. But […] she thought I was ready. ‘You’re an executive chef now,’ she said – and so the real cooking lesson could begin.
“With her tiny hands, she liberated the chicken from its bones so fast, for a moment I didn’t know what parts were left. When she made the embutido (pork and sausage stuffing), I could’ve been watching [chef] Jacques Pépin: it required the precision of a French farce (finely puréed meat). Then she nested hard-boiled eggs in the stuffing and sewed the bird shut, as calm and steady as a surgeon.