As a child in Lockport, Jennifer Aranas found her mother’s Filipino home cooking far more palatable than American grub. “My mom was a nurse who worked the graveyard shift, so she had a lot of time to cook for her kids. She chopped, diced, shredded, did all that labor-intensive work Filipino food demands,” she says. “It helped that she was a terrific cook.” At her side Aranas gradually became versed in recipes from her parents’ native Cebu, one of the major islands of the Philippines.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
All that time in the kitchen had an unintended effect. Though she had a degree in accounting from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Aranas started studying the restaurant trade in 1994. The decision didn’t sit well with her parents. “My folks are professionals with middle-class Filipino values,” she explains. “To them, cooking for strangers is blue-collar work, not appropriate for a college graduate. They still don’t realize that a lot of chefs in this country are celebrities and make more money than professors.” While working as an accountant for a real estate firm, Aranas enrolled at Evanston’s Kendall College, known for its rigorous classes in cooking and restaurant management. After graduation she was hired as a line cook at Cassis, a now defunct Gold Coast eatery.
When Aranas went to Cebu with her family 12 years ago–her first and only visit–she found the air pungent, redolent of rice fields and chicken coops. Their relatives treated them to lavish home-cooked meals. Aranas says she began to appreciate the abundance of tropical produce in Cebuano cooking and the depth of the Spanish influence. “We use tomatoes and garlic a lot–both, I believe, are Spanish imports,” she says. “Many of our dishes have Spanish names and counterparts, like camarones rebosados and chicken tinola, except we put in papaya, cilantro, mint, and such. I sometimes serve arroz caldo, a soup whose chief ingredient, rice, came from India, then got all the way to Spain and the Americas, and eventually found its way in a Spanish recipe back to Asia, to the Philippines. I find that fascinating. There’s still so much to know about cross-fertilization of dishes in two related countries.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Jim Newberry.
