What a versatile meat, that which we call chicken. It is perfect for almost all kinds of cooking – from simple, homey dishes to haute cuisine. It is also one of the universal meats eaten by people from different creeds, except of course, the vegetarians. A less expensive and healthy meat, chicken also makes its appearance on many dining tables more than pork or beef.

A few times this year, chicken figured into my personal “Can you say that again?” list. This list is part of my notes on food but focuses on quotes I find in the press, TV, radio, the internet and other public sources that get me thinking and researching further. On this list appear things I never heard of before that make me curious and usually send me off on culinary adventures now and then. It also contains a few things I hear that I know outright as false but to be sure, I embark on an academic exercise that more often than not, not only serve to confirm my suspicions, but also open new and exciting doors to my research.

So what about this chicken? Why is it in my list? Well, it’s not entirely about chicken but it was the common denominator.

The first reason was brought about by a TV advertisement I chanced upon one evening. It was for a seasoning purported to make one’s cooking tasty (unnecessary, I should say) which is supposedly endorsed by home cooks from all over the archipelago and uses different Filipino languages. Given the way it was made, the Capampangan lady in the advertisement implied that chicken is the meat of choice for Capampangan adobo and among the ingredients for the dish is coconut milk. Ayayay! I really gave a loud gasp when I heard that. Whoever did the research for that ad should be reprimanded.

Don’t they know that Capampangans would cook almost any meat into adobo? Chicken, yes, but pork, duck, field mice and bats (talibatab) too! Well, I can let that pass but what about adding coconut milk? As far as my research goes, Capampangans hardly use coconut milk for savoury dishes. Very, very seldom is it used that savoury dishes with coconut milk, such as bringhe and tamalis, seem to be the exception rather than the rule.

Since that issue is out of the way, I just have to nitpick. If they were trying to sound authentic with the use of Capampangan, how come the term they used for coconut milk was ‘gata’ instead of ‘piga’? I wonder if they think we just ‘piga’ the ngungut to get the ‘gata’. (piga=squeeze in Tagalog, ngungut=mature coconut in Capampangan, gata=coconut milk in Tagalog)
Not being an avid TV viewer, I don’t know if that advertisement is still being aired. Perhaps it’s off the air now but I really hope it didn’t do much damage to our culinary identity.

The second chicken issue I have also has something to do with research or lack of it. Sometime back, a food columnist for a widely-circulated national daily asserted that Filipinos do not cook chicken for sinigang. I had to read her sentence twice or thrice just to be sure I was getting it right.

I knew or a fact that many people in Sta. Rita and the neighbouring towns cooked sigang manuc. Aren’t we Filipinos?

With a bit of research, I tried to find out from north, south, east and west Capampangans if they cooked sigang manuc. The reply was a resounding “Of course we do!” A few even asked me cheekily, “Obat e mu balu, e ca Capampangan?” (Why don’t you know, aren’t you Capampangan?) hehehe! It was confirmed that we do make use of chicken in that famous soup and we use tamarind as the souring agent. It is the Tagalogs who do not because they have sinampalukang manok, which is similar to sigang but with a weak acidity.

I am not trying to make a mountain out of a molehill but what I object to is how people in national media often generalise their assertions in encompassing and misleading statements. I hope we have less of that next year.