Dining Guide
Chinese Cuisine
Of all non-Philippine cuisines Chinese is the most prevalent in the Philippine capital - so much so that it has been partially in-tegrated into Philippine cuisine; for a number of Philippine dishes it is meanwhile hard to say whether they are originally Filipino or whether they were adopted from Chinese cuisine. One example is the very common Mami soups, served in Filipino and Chinese restaurants alike. Mami is not a common Chinese word used to describe that particular kind of soup and it is unknown in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Bangkok. But it also is not a Tagalog word.
The word Mami was introduced in the Philippines by a popular Chinese restaurant and noodle fac-tory, Ma Mon Lok. Incidentally the owners of the restaurant and noodle factory hail from the Chinese province of Fookien. So they used their own word for what they sold. And the success of the company Ma Mon Lok has paved the way for the entry of the Fookien word Mami into the Philippine language.
In the Philippines today Mami soups are differentiated according to the ingredient aside from soup and noodles. The most common are chicken mami and beef mami; pork is added either as pre-fried spare ribs or in wantons. Wantons are dough pockets that are filled with a mixture of pork and shrimp; pork and shrimp is a combination that may sound awkward to Westerners but it is fairly common in Chinese cooking. Siomai, small steamed dumplings, also are mostly based on a pork and shrimp mixture.
Siomai belongs to and is the most common of a unique Chinese food, the dimsum. Actually dimsum is more than just a category of dishes; it's an eating habit. Dim-sums are small dishes taken for snacks or tea time (in Chinese: yam cha); they are served in res-taurants on a trolley. Most of the dimsum dishes are steamed but they may also be fried or braised. Com-mon to all dimsums is that they are small portions, in bite size, and normally strongly flavored. Dimsum is of Cantonese origin and very popular not only in the Philippines but also in Hong Kong. But in contrast to Hong Kong, one of the most popular dimsum dishes in the Philippines is chicken feet served fried and in a heavy sauce with black beans.
Noodles occupy an important position in Chinese cuisine. Ac-tually, the Chinese were the in-ventors of noodles, and they were brought to the European noodle country, Italy, by Marco Polo only in the 13th century.
Unlike the Italians who can't explain why their spaghetti are impractically long the Chinese do have a seemingly very logical reason why the longer the noodles are the better; to the ever super-stitious Chinese long noodles mean long life. Making noodles the traditional Chinese way is an acrobatic art. The dough is pulled and whirled through the air in or-der to stretch it through centrifugal force; but today machines use other techniques.
There are two kinds of noodles in Chinese cuisine, egg noodles or Mien, and rice noodles or Bijon (in English sometimes referred to as glass noodles because they just look like they were made of glass). Whereas egg noodles are mostly in the shape of thin spaghetti, rice noodles are also commonly served as ho fan (wide noodles like the Italian fettucine and tagliatelle).
Noodles can be served three ways: in a clear soup with meat and some vegetables, or mixed with meat and with a thickened sauce poured over (in the Philippines commonly called Pancit, or without sauce; whereas for Pancit, egg noodles (Mien) are commonly used, it's Bijon noodles if served without sauce.
Pancit style dishes appear on Chinese menus with English trans-lations often specified as fried. This is grossly misleading as they are mostly just barely sauted. There is nothing crisp in such a "fried" dish, and the rather tasteless cornstarch sauce gives the dish a porridge texture.
Those who want to eat dishes that are fried by Western stand-ards must order deep-fried dishes in Chinese English terminology. Deep-fried dishes include spring rolls, shrimp, and prawns.
Except for the already mentioned clear soups with noodles (mami soups), there also are many thickened soups in Chinese cuisine. As in the case of the pancit sauce, the thickening is produced normally from corn starch. Like clear soups the thickened soups may contain meats, fish, seafood and vegetables. In contrast to Western cuisine, Chinese cooking commonly uses let-tuce in soups but not in salads.
The two most famous Chinese soups, shark fin soup and bird's nest soup appear to be thickened but the glutinous texture does in neither case result from the addition of corn starch but from the two main ingredients, shark fin and bird's nests which are simmered for many hours.
As the Chinese are the only people who can make a sensible use of shark fins they are imported by Chinese traders from all over the world - to Hong Kong and also to Manila.
More on Chinese cuisine:
Restaurants
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This page: http://www.cockatoo.com/english/philippines/philippines_chinese_cuisine.htm
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