“Today’s Google Doodle reminded me of you!”
My phone lights up with a notification from a university friend, and I wonder what facet of my identity we’re celebrating today. Being an international woman? That was last Wednesday. Ten years of praying for Papa Francesco? That was yesterday. A job-seeking graduate? Surely not Google Doodle material.
SARAP! Today's Google Doodle celebrates the Filipino Favourite, Chicken Adobo
I open yet another tab and am met by a steaming pile of rice and chicken adobo, with two cartoon Filipino kids grinning as they inhale the mountain of goodness piled up in front of them. In an all-too-familiar moment, the girl’s glasses are clouding up as she comes near the piping hot chicken.
Today’s Google Doodle celebrates the sixteenth anniversary of the word ‘adobo’ being added to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), in a wordlist released on this day in 2007.
Adobo is a firm Filipino family-favourite; a staple in Filipino homes across the world. It’s a delightfully simple recipe: chicken (or tofu or aubergine, if you’re vegan) marinated in equal portions of vinegar and soy sauce, with garlic, bay leaves, and black pepper.
For those of us with Filipino heritage, Chicken Adobo is also served with a heaping of homely nostalgia.
It’s the warm comforting hug when you’ve come home from a freezing after-school sports practice in the dark British winter.
It’s the meal you first try to recreate in your cluttered cupboard-sized student kitchen or foreign flat-share to stave off your homesickness.
It’s your go-to dish to cook up for new-found friends and flatmates to show your appreciation, or win them over.
Food, faith, and family play an integral part in Filipino culture; in a Filipino kitchen, a painting of the Last Supper, or a little statue of cupped hands holding the scene, will often hang next to the large wooden fork and spoon, which form the ‘Google’ in today’s Doodle.
Shared mealtimes take on both a profound meaning and extended time-frame. Filipino family gatherings or high-school reunions stretch on for hours as the next plate of pancit bihon (Filipino glass noodles) is produced and you are almost force-fed brightly-coloured sticky rice cakes by an over-insistent Tita (aunt).
This is invariably the same Tita who has also just remarked that you’ve put on weight since you’ve last seen her. This is invariably true, as you have most likely not seen her since a previous Christmas reunion, years before.
Chicken Adobo is almost symbolic of this deep sense of selfless love and service which lies at the heart of Filipino culture.
It’s this sense of welcome, of joyful fellowship, of love for the other, which we wish to serve up when we cook it for our friends, flatmates, and colleagues.
My British Grandmother, whose diaries serve as an incredibly comprehensive family archive, recently came across an entry from her time working as a young doctor. She had scribbled down that a Filipina colleague at the hospital had cooked her Chicken Adobo for dinner, which she had ‘never tried before and found delicious’. And that was decades before she’d find herself with a Filipina daughter-in-law.
KAIN TAYO! Serving up Chicken Adobo for the Catholic students at the University Chaplaincy last year
On a particularly memorable evening at the Fisher House Chaplaincy last year, I walked in to the smell of Chicken Adobo wafting in from the kitchen, where a group of Filipino students (the self-styled ‘Pisher House Pilipino’s’) had cooked up a feast for the weekly dinner.
It went down a treat, with rave reviews and empty plates returning back into the kitchen. In fact, the plates were almost worryingly empty, for the ravenous British students had evidently also munched down the whole peppercorns and bay leaves we’d left floating in the sauce for extra flavour.
Amusingly, one horrified Filipina student commented, ‘one bite of a peppercorn is enough to kill my vibe’. And as if our love for Chicken Adobo hadn’t bonded us enough, we also turned out to be cousins of cousins, because everyone in the Philippines - and even elsewhere (she lives in Australia) - truly is a cousin of sorts.
In one of my more commendable language-learning endeavours, I once participated in a Japanese speech competition where I essentially spoke for five minutes about Chicken Adobo. It roughly translated to: “I love Chicken Adobo! Chicken Adobo is delicious. Ladies and Gentlemen, have you ever tried Chicken Adobo? If you go to the Philippines, you should try Chicken Adobo! Please come to the Philippines!”
Perhaps it was my ability to use every grammatical structure possible to talk about Chicken Adobo, but the Chicken Adobo speech did capture the hearts, or rather stomachs, of the panel of judges, and landed 12-year-old me on the podium.
A triumphant win for Chicken Adobo.
Many years later, in yet another language-learning endeavour, I found myself in a translation class faced with the opening passage of Proust’s ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ (In Search of Lost Time), where a mouthful of the French miniature sponge cake, the madeleine, unlocks memories from Proust's childhood.
My conclusion to this piece is perhaps as tenuously related as my hundreds of wonderful Filipino cousins are. But I’d like to suggest that for those of us who have grown up squabbling with our Kuya’s (older brother) for the last spoonful of adobo sauce, and astounding our friends by our ability to eat a chicken bone clean, the humble Chicken Adobo is our very own Proustian madeleine.
Now, what was it that I was Googling again?