I was born with a hint of Chinese blood flowing from my veins—well, that’s what my father claims to be. Although it is not very evident if you try to see my physical aspects, it is very much etched within my personality. One of my traits that made me feel that I was really from the Chinese aborigines is my love for Dimsum! Yes! In my entire life, I have never gone tired of eating Chinese food! In fact, I learned to make and had my own recipe for Chao fan (Chinese fried rice) during my early high school years. I guess I was thirteen years old then.
But one of the best Chinese dimsum that I’ve ever tasted (in my personal opinion) is Siomai. It is some kind of a meatball that’s wrapped in a molo wrapper and steamed until the meat and other ingredients are cooked evenly. However, it’s not all of the Chinese restaurants and food chains offer good tasting Siomai. There are some whose version is overcooked and some are using low quality meat! And it’s quite sad to conclude that these restaurants degrade the Chinese cuisine with what they’re doing.
In the Philippines, Siomai has now become one of the street foods that most Filipino patronizes. This all happened when some mobile cart started selling such dimsum on the night market. At first, I had a violent reaction about it. I thought it was another degrading thing. And to think that it is sold on a very low price, I expected that it would taste bland!
One time, due to curiosity, I tried to buy from one of those food carts around the night market. I bought six pieces of it for myself, costing only 20 pesos. It was placed in little paper plates and a customer can freely put some soy sauce on it and some chilli sauce. I place lots of lemon and soy sauce on mine, in case it does not fit my taste. But to my surprise, I was wrong with my first impression because it tasted so damn good!! A Chinese cuisine with a classic Filipino flavour!!
It was really a lesson on my part! I guess I have to correct my idea of cuisine degradation. I realized that a cuisine is not degraded when it is sold in streets to capture the taste of the masses.
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