Canned Meat Products

IMAG0145.jpg, originally uploaded by NCVillamar.

No respectable blog purporting to portray the life of a Filipino would be complete without a blog about canned meat products. You are not true to your culture, Pinoys and Pinays, unless you can appreciate the rather significant presence of Spam, Vienna sausages, and corned beef in your lives. My parents didn't immigrate to the United States until I was six years old, back in 1974. Ours was a home that was as Filipino as it could be considering the lack of a cohesive Filipino community in California back then. We spoke Tagalog for the most part, and we ate Filipino food -- we didn't grow up on Big Macs and fries. Both my parents were excellent cooks, and they lavished us with the most delicious Filipino dishes you can imagine-- just typing about it makes me salivate.

But our palates were not too refined for canned meat products. There's nothing like coming home to the smell of ginisang corned beef (corned beef sauteed with onions, garlic, and tomatos). It's easy and scrumptious. It was one of the first recipes my younger brother learned to cook.  Or how about that chicken dish with potatos, red bell peppers, green olives, and sliced vienna sausages cooked with a little bit of tomato paste? The Vienna sausages are always the first to go. I often crave the egg thing Mama used to cook for us for breakfast -- the fancy word would be "frittata" -- but in my house we just called it diced spam and potatos cooked into an egg mixture. In my opinion, it's best eaten with Mafran, a Filipino ketchup made from bananas. Spam for breakfast is another favorite -- served with scrambled eggs and rice. It's better than bacon, and, because sliced Spam is rectangular and flat, easier to cook. For that matter, Vienna sausages can be breakfast for the champions as well.

Big-box stores profit off Filipinos if they carry canned meats. Before my parents would go to the Philippines for their annual trip, they would hit the local Price Club and buy cartons and cartons of Spam, Vienna sausages, and corned beef.  They could fill a few balikbayan boxes with them. Our coat closet at home looked like the canned goods aisle at Price Club, Costco and BJs. This wasn't unusual -- I guarantee every Filipino house in America at one point or another has contained at least 50 cans of meat products simultaneously.

Randy read a newspaper article recently about a Filipino couple who owned a bar in Fell's Point. They were implicated in an arms deal, and the police were closing in on them. Coincidentally, right before they were to be arrested, the women in the family left for the Philippines. The police found it "highly unusual" that the four women checked in 14 pieces of luggage on their flight. This information was used to establish probable cause for a search warrant. My husband, who due to my influence has learned to look at police action with a skeptical eye, gaffawed at this.

"They're Filipino!" he told a co-worker. "I guarantee half that luggage contained their shoes. And the other half contained Spam and sausages."

He was sort of right, because the newspapers later reported that the police in fact found no guns in the women's suitcases and boxes. Randy knows. He's been married to me and my family for eight years, after all.