Alfonso Felix Jr., the director of the Historical Conservation Society and publisher of The Poor Man’s Cookbook (1979), realized that the Philippine government was not the place to turn to for a publication that helped the nation’s poor. The presidential administration of Ferdinand Marcos was battling to maintain its power in the face of civil unrest. The country’s economic class divide, long a historical problem, isolated the rich from the struggles of the poor. A cookbook with recipes and instructions for the poor, however useful, was not high on the priority list of the national government, so Felix accepted foreign aid from religious organizations and foreign governments. “We have counted on the kindness and civic spirit of many to make this cookbook and they have not failed,” he wrote in the cookbook’s introduction. But Felix’s reliance on the west revealed that The Poor Man’s Cookbook was more than just a collection of recipes. Indeed, it was a publication that cast the West in a favorable light in the height of the Cold War. The Poor Man’s Cookbook was a tool to win the hearts and minds of the Philippine poor. Its recipes captured frugality and resourcefulness in cooking, and the book’s instructions and diagrams on rice threshing appealed to the masses by efficiently preparing the staple crop of the nation. This piece examines The Poor Man’s Cookbook from two perspectives: as a record of the culinary preferences of the Philippine poor, and as a tool of Cold War western humanitarian aid.

Recipes and content

The contents and organization of The Poor Man's Cookbook were fairly standard with the exception of the final section on rice threshers. It was a 100-page soft cover publication that contained glossy color illustrations of each dish printed on stock paper that was portable for use in both home and classroom kitchens. There was a short introduction (6 pages); directions and descriptions of 98 recipes (42 pages); color photographs of each dish (26 pages); a glossary with the names of ingredients in Tagalog, English, and binomial nomenclature (6 pages). The final section on rice hullers with diagrams and descriptions (18 pages) made the cookbook exceptional as it doubled as an instructional manual for simple rice preparation technology for the masses. Readers immediately noticed the authors favored dishes from Luzon just by reading the table of contents. Most of the recipes came from the Central Luzon and Southern Tagalog regions that were close to Manila. The regions of coconut-rich Bicol and bagoong-rich [salted shrimp paste] Northern Luzon constituted nearly a third of the recipes. Recipes from the Visayas region constituted the smallest portion of the cookbook. There were no recipes from Mindanao, a revealing detail of culinary and cultural bias because of the region’s historical battle to create a Muslim independent state that governors in Manila had ignored since the 16th century. While the book’s target audience was poor people throughout the Philippines, it prioritized the flavors of Luzon and maximized the use of ingredients that were readily available in both urban and rural contexts. The eponymous poor man was just as easily a resident of the megalopolis of Manila as he was a poor farmer in the provinces (Table 1).

The dishes received their flavor notes from cheap and plentiful ingredients. Salty tastes came from bagoong, bitter tastes from vinegars and tomatoes, and distinctly Filipino flavors from items such as malunggay [horseradish leaf], garlic, and ginger. Most recipes called for ingredients from the traditional Hispanic soffritto of onion, tomato, and garlic – a legacy of Spanish imperialism originating in the 16th century when Spanish galleons brought New World tomatoes and continental European flavor profiles to the archipelago. 70.4 percent of the recipes used onion, 48.0 percent tomato, and 45.9 percent garlic. Other inexpensive flavoring agents such as ginger (22.4 percent) and malunggay [horseradish leaf] (12.2 percent) provided umami, or savory taste. A few recipes called for bottled ingredients that are ubiquitous around the Philippines. 12.2 percent of the recipes called for coconut vinegar and 11.2 percent for bagoong. A few simple root vegetables, herbs, and cheap bottled ingredients shaped the flavor profile for most of these dishes (Table 2).

In the same spirit, the primary ingredients in these recipes were also plentiful and cheap. The recipes did not call for expensive proteins such as pork, beef, or chicken. They instead favored cheaper ulam [accompanying dishes] made from produce, legumes, tubers, and seafood that paired well with rice. Two-thirds of the recipes featured vegetables (34.7 percent) or seafood (32.7 percent); the rest used fruits (13.3 percent), legumes (10.2 percent), and tubers (8.2 percent). Only one recipe (dinuguan, or pig’s blood stew) used meat. Two recipes (banana heart burger and meatless lumpia [eggroll] shanghai) substituted meat with banana heart. Unsurprisingly, cheap and plentiful ingredients composed the majority of the poor man’s diet (Table 3).

The cooking methods of these recipes used simple preparations. The Philippine tropical heat made long cooking times requiring plenty of fuel impractical, so the cookbook recipes had short cooking times. 81.6 percent of the recipes required little more than boiling ingredients that had been roughly chopped. The rest of the recipes also called for short cooking times: sautéing (9.1 percent), broiling (5.1 percent), deep frying (3.0 percent) and assembling (2.0 percent). The cookbook authors understood that short meals with minimal exposure to heat would appeal to their readership (Table 4).

Finally, the recipes in The Poor Man’s Cookbook maximized nutrients in all ingredients. They even added the water used for rinsing rice to recipes because it contained calcium and thickened soups and stews. 42.6 percent of the recipes called for this “rice washing.” By comparison, 28.6 percent of the recipes used plain water and 17.3 percent used coconut milk (Table 5).

The Poor Man’s Cookbook provided instructions for feeding a family of five Filipinos on a budget of just 1.50 Philippine pesos – or just three US cents a day. These frugal recipes aptly suited the cookbook’s title. But what about the story behind the cookbook’s publication? How did financial support from Western religious societies and governments affect the cookbook?

Publication support and funding

The Philippine government played a minimal role in the contents and creation of The Poor Man’s Cookbook. It paid the salaries of three faculty members who tested seventy cookbook recipes at the Institute of Human Ecology from the University of the Philippines at Los Baños, b. But the chief technician of the Magnolia Dairy Products Division of the San Miguel Corporation also contributed twenty-eight recipes. In the cookbook’s introduction, Alfonso Felix Jr. praised these food scientists for displaying “a very great semi-hidden fund of kindness and civic cooperation,” a trait that he claimed characterized the Filipino people. But in the following sentence, Felix also said the nation’s potential for kindness and civic cooperation lacked “the leadership that we have so far not gotten to bring it to the surface.” Felix thus criticized the Philippine government’s inability to meet the basic needs of the poor. He slyly rebuked the the Philippine government in the seemingly innocuous pages of a cookbook.

Part of the reason why he was able to voice such displeasure with the Philippine government was The Poor Man’s Cookbook was paid for by Western religious and government aid. European and American leaders filled the void for instruction that the Philippine government failed to meet. In the process, they intended to win the hearts and minds of the Philippine masses. It was unsurprising that three Catholic aid organizations helped pay for the cookbook because the Philippine population was 83 percent Catholic in the 1970s. These three religious agencies were Church World Service of Elkhart, Indiana; Catholic Relief Services of Baltimore, Maryland; and MISEREOR of Aachen, Germany. Two American government agencies—The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and The Asia Foundation—paid the majority of the publishing. USAID was the cookbook’s primary sponsor and the organization was founded by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 as the first American government agency committed to foreign aid. Its early Philippine initiatives focused on Muslim populations in Mindanao, but USAID also funded programs for infrastructure, administration, governance, electoral, health, and the environment around the country. The Asia Foundation was the successor to the Committee for Free Asia, a US government organization supported by the National Security Agency and financed by the Central Intelligence Agency; it had also historically backed covert pro-democracy initiatives in Southeast Asia. Finally, the government of Switzerland contributed to the book’s publication via the Swiss Office of Technical Cooperation. A combination of Western religious and government funding made The Poor Man’s Cookbook into an instrument of western goodwill.

The imagined international readership of The Poor Man’s Cookbook hinted at the global intentions of these Western contributors. Felix confidently wrote that the recipes would transfer easily to other “tropical” areas of the world, specifically suggesting Ruanda-Urundi, Peru, and the Sahel. He wanted to hire an illustrator from the College of Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines to draft comics illustrating each dish, its ingredients, a person cooking the recipe, and a simple comic book-style conversation describing the dish’s preparation and nutritional value. In the eyes of the book’s authors and the contributors, The Poor Man’s Cookbook had appeal beyond the Philippines to poor people around the world; perhaps it could also promote Western religious and government ideals in countries besides the Philippines.

The cookbook’s priority to win popular support of the poor was clearest in the contents of the final section on rice hullers. The final 18 pages of book were devoted to diagrams and descriptions of two kinds of rice hullers that would thresh rice, the staple crop of the nation, up to five times more efficiently than traditional methods. Both models required no electricity, were powered by hand, and used just wood, stone, and nails to construct. These hand-operated disc hullers removed the husk, bran, and germ of rice kernels to create “polished” rice. They used less energy than traditional hand-powered mortars and pestles. The book advised readers to place these new hullers in central locations that were part of everyday life such as sari-sari [convenience] stores, rice shops, and in the homes of wealthy provincial families centrally located in the town square. The designers of these rice hullers had clear connections to the promotion of Western religion and government in the Philippines as well. Derek Warburton-Brown prepared the first rice huller design for use in rice stores because it operated best in high volumes. He was formerly a major in the British Royal Corps of Electrical and Mechanical Engineers and a member of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization; Warburton-Brown was the director of the European Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines when the cookbook was published. The second rice huller design was by Willard Unruh, an American Baptist missionary and member of the Mennonite Church. He created a smaller, simpler design tailored for home use that anyone could construct. Unruh had previously served as a missionary in Haiti, Somalia, and Nepal. His work designing a rice huller for the Philippine masses was a natural extension to a career spent as a missionary working to improve food systems and nutrition in the developing world. Thus, all parts of The Poor Man’s Cookbook from the kitchen recipes rice huller diagrams had the imprimatur of the West. Large Western organizations and governments funded its publication for use in kitchens, and individual Western engineers drafted its technical instructions for use in public markets and private homes. They clearly saw food as the key to winning popular support in the Philippines.

Conclusion

With a title like The Poor Man’s Cookbook, a reader automatically knew affordable recipes were inside the book. Dishes logically made use of plentiful, cheap ingredients and maximized their nutritional content. But a close reading of The Poor Man’s Cookbook reveals much more. There was a bias for recipes with origins around Manila. Recipes substituted banana heart for meat, used a handful of ingredients repeatedly, and did not even throw out the water used to wash rice. The story behind the book’s publication showed the importance Western religious organizations and governments placed on providing aid to the Philippine poor. It was not just a cookbook with familiar recipes, but also an instructional manual for preparing the nation’s staple crop in efficient ways. Thus, The Poor Man’s Cookbook was a tool that won over Filipinos with its recipes, keeping stomachs full of rice and political allegiances to the West.

Appendix A

The recipes in The Poor Man’s Cookbook in order are the following:

1. Binagoongan Binnik
2. Calunay (Uray) Salad
3. Cassava (Kamoteng Kahoy) with Vegetables
4. Denengdeng
5. Dinuguan
6. Denengdeng na Saba
7. Daing with Saluyot
8. Ginisang Dried Paayap
9. Inabrao with Dried Dilis
10. Ipon Tamales
11. Inabrao nga Aba
12. Kardis Ginisa
13. Munggo with Talinum
14. Pinakbet
15. Pinalkang
16. Adobong Sapsap
17. Bulanglang
18. Banana Blossom Tortilla
19. Ensaladang Talinum
20. Fish Balls with Misua Soup
21. Guisado
22. Galunggong with Tausi
23. Kinamatisan
24. Kamote Tops with Tausi
25. Mustasa in Misu
26. Malunggay with Bagoong
27. Meatless Burger
28. Meatless Rellenong Talong
29. Papaya at Malunggay
30. Pinais na Alagao
31. Sinigang
32. Susong Bulanglang
33. Suam
34. Tokwa with Tausi
35. Tinolang Tulya
36. Ubod Ng Tubo
37. Burong Mustasa with Egg
38. Bulanglang I
39. Bulanglang II
40. Bola-Bola with Miswa
41. Dilis Sinigang
42. Dilis Escabeche
43. Fish Sinigang
44. Fish and Cabbage Roll
45. Guinataang Laing
46. Inalamangang Kangkong
47. Kalabasang Guisado
48. Kangkong Adobo
49. Laksa
50. Munggo Guisado
51. Munggo Guisado with Dilis
52. Meatless Lumpiang Shanghai
53. Mango Leaves Salad
54. Okoy
55. Okra-Sigarilyas Salad
56. Pechay Guisado
57. Pucherong Galunggong
58. Pinais na Tagunton
59. Sauted Sigarilyas
60. Sayote Patties
61. Squash and Tahong
62. Salted Kamote Tops
63. Salted Fish
64. Sinigang na Puso ng Saging
65. Toge (Sprouted Mongo)
66. Upo Kinamatisan
67. Bagisara
68. Baked Vegetables
69. Cocedo
70. Dulong with Kolis
71. Ginataang Bayabas
72. Ginataang Kuhol
73. Ginataang Kalabasa
74. Ginataang Langka
75. Ginataang Sitao
76. Kulaho
77. Kilawin
78. Kangkong Ginataan
79. Latong
80. Munggo
81. Pickled Dulong or Tabios
82. Pinangat 83. Suso
84. Sarciadong Suso
85. Apan-Apan
86. Banana Heart Burger
87. Ginataan Igi Cag Paayap
88. Ginataan Tambo (Labong) Cag Mais
89. Kinilaw
90. Laswa
91. Laswa II
92. Laswa III
93. Munggo Cag Langka
94. Munggo Cag Alugbati
95. Malunggay Cag Dilis
96. Tinotuan
97. Ubod Cag Munggo
98. Ubod Ginataan