Photo courtesy of Pilar Valdes
There is no standard way to make sinigang. In her essay, the on-air chef for ‘The Drew Barrymore Show’ Pilar Valdes writes about how its recipe can be uniquely one’s own, as hers has become “as layered and intuitive as my own experiences.”
This essay is the first of Vogue Voices, Vogue Philippines’ biweekly series of personal essays on memory, culture, moments, identity, family, and community.
I was 10 years old, standing on a stool in my mom’s kitchen, when I tried to cook my first sinigang, the traditional sour soup from the Philippines. I stole a sip: it was addictively tart. Brothy. Savory. Just how I liked it.
And as I brought the bowl to the table for my family to try, it was at that moment that it hit me. Joy. Not only from making the soup just right, but from the distinct pleasure of feeding other people.
Imagine: sauteed Philippine tomatoes warmed by the (perennial) summer sun, then our native red onions and sometimes ginger, punchy and sweet, then a tangle of vegetables: okra, kangkong, long beans. The broth is made with the water used to wash the rice because, in the Philippines, we never waste anything. Starchy taro root gifts the broth with heft and tinges it a milky hue.
There is always a souring agent typically dictated by the region in which the sinigang is being made. Commonly, pale green unripe tamarind pods, but also tart green mangoes, maybe guava, or the acidic explosion of a native kamias or batuan-varied bounty found all across the archipelago predating colonial times.
Then, the protein: pork, or head on shrimp, or milkfish or my favorite, a salmon head, comes next. You finish the pot according to your lasa, your taste, a pinch or two of rock salt, dash of fish sauce. I eat it served with a side of bagoong [fermented shrimp paste].
There is always a dance to find the delicate balance between sweetness, the savoriness, and that puckery sour that unlocks the juices right at the jaw.
It seems like a simple soup. But a good sinigang is dictated by paying close attention: It is an intuitive, steamy study in layering; the sizzle of when you have coaxed out just the right amount of umami and sweetness from the aromatics; when to add the hugas bigas, rice wash water, to allow the brothiness to take shape; knowing when to add the greens so they wilt just right.
But it is also a broth of adaptability, utilizing what is best and fresh on hand. Just like in life, there is no one way to make it or one standard ingredient list; it is so varied but also instantly recognizable. Each pot is marked by the place. It is soup as a conversation of season, of place, as told by the hands of its maker. That soup, to me, is one of the most beautiful bowls of food.
Sinigang is home.
I started cooking, casually, out of sheer homesickness. At 19, I moved from the sticky warmth of Manila to New York, leaving my family and all that was familiar behind.
When I first made sinigang upon moving to New York, I made it with a sachet of Mama Sita’s Sinigang sa Sampalok, a premade tamarind soup mix. It tasted exactly like my childhood.
For the first eight years of my professional life, I worked in the nonprofit world running after-school programs with teenagers engaged in collective storytelling. But at three in the morning, I could be found baking bread, or working out an excel spreadsheet to see how to make my modest non-profit paycheck accommodate the grand culinary plan for the weekend, like figuring out how to build a pit to cook a pig in my friends’ backyard as a nod to my native Lechon.
My bedside table was always stacked with cookbooks, whose oil-stained creases held a palimpsest of salt and spices, of a life well cooked.
As an immigrant, food, specifically eating and gathering people around a table, was an important part of how I placed myself in the world. I was feeding people so often that friends kept suggesting that I consider a professional life in food. But I had never been to culinary school. I thought I was too “old” to start a new career in the kitchen. I was in my late twenties.
As luck would have it, my dear friend Binh, who worked at the same organization as I did, was also itching for a change. We were two tenacious home cooks with no formal culinary training but armed with a lot of grit.
We had similar palates: a borderless perspective on food, with Southeast Asian flavors as touchstones. 10 years after I moved to NYC, at the ripe old age of 30, she and I launched Kickshaw Cookery. It started as a lunch subscription service. We were like two lunch ladies, crisscrossing the city on the subway with our teetering boxes. We cooked lasagna and roast chicken, but also Banh Xeo, and Adobo, and Pancit, weaving the flavors of home into our food, grounded by produce from our local farmers market. We cooked out of a commercial shared kitchen space, dedicated predominantly to women and immigrant food entrepreneurs (and went from cooking for 20-30 clients to catering for up to 500 people.)
“In life, we build our own flavors, based on what we recall, what we loved, and who we are today.”
In the kitchen, we worked side by side with other food businesses, tasting spoons in each others pots; ladies expertly slathering clarified butter on each layered leaf for delicious msemmen; hands painstakingly deskinning black eyed peas producing the most tender Nigerian moi moi. Many of us had not worked in professional kitchens nor gone to culinary school, but we wielded life experience, memories of our mothers’ stoves, expertise of a different flavor. Looking around that kitchen, I felt like I found my culinary home.
And then four years into running our business, Binh had her daughter, and so she shifted gears, and she and her husband moved to Texas to be closer to her family. I continued to run Kickshaw Cookery on my own.
And it sucked. Those next three years were rough. Lonely. The doubts began to creep back in—can I do this? Am I good enough? I struggled to find my grounding. Seven years in, and as I slowed down my catering company and shifted to private clients, I considered hanging up my professional knives and apron for good.
But life had other plans on my menu.
In the spring of 2018, I woke up to an email that said, “Chef for Drew Barrymore.” I, of course, like any rational human being, immediately thought this was spam. It was an odd thing to then find myself in the kitchen of Drew, someone who I had grown up watching on TV (all the way in the Philippines.) Suddenly we were sitting around her kitchen island, talking about our favorite cookbook authors, meals that had left an indelible mark.
We bonded over the idea of home.
I worked for her as her private chef and in 2019, Drew was shooting a pilot for a morning show and she invited me to do a cooking segment with her. The idea of standing next to one of the most well-known faces on the planet and cooking on camera, in front of a live audience, well, just the thought of it turned my knees to jelly. I honestly was nervous about embarrassing myself.
I called my sister for advice. “Just trust that everything you’ve done in your life has prepared you for this.” And then quoting the words of our sage, late grandmother, “If you mess up, don’t worry. Walang namamatay sa hiya. No one dies from shame.”
And so, I said yes.
Proving you are never too old for a new job, in 2020, the year I turned 40, I became a regular on-air chef for the Drew Barrymore Show. Now, five seasons in, I have the privilege of sharing recipes with this immense, generous platform beamed into millions of homes every day. Yes, I’ve made lasagna and pot pies on the show, but also Kilawin and Ensaladang Talong, continuing to weave in the flavors of home.
These days, I make sinigang often, but it no longer looks like the soup of my childhood. It is not made from my beloved pre-packaged soup mix. In life, we build our own flavors, based on what we recall, what we loved, and who we are today. We create a taste—complex, and comforting, recreating the familiar—and at the same time, fresh and new.
I’ve found that using ripe tamarind pods, which are easier for me to source in New York, with the right seasoning, work quite well. I incorporate sour rhubarb or tomatillos, ingredients that I had never laid eyes on in the Philippines but are quite abundant in the US, which add just the right amount of acidic twang. My soup is now as layered and intuitive as my own experiences, made all the more rich by the bounty of new flavors. I lean into the substitutions, check the panlasa, and season to taste. In conjuring a cherished memory, I create a whole new version of home, distinctly a soup of my own.
Pilar Valdes is a New York-based chef and the co-founder of Kickshaw Cookery, a private chef and catering company. Presently, she is the regular on-air chef and senior culinary contributor for The Drew Barrymore Show. In 2021, she also co-authored the cookbook Rebel Homemaker: Food, Family, Life with Drew Barrymore.
