Journalist gets into accidental food business
Pandemic times are hard times, if a review of news reports and historical texts about the Spanish Flu pandemic are any indicator. Businesses, and their employees, will suffer. So, “journalist” may be a vaunted epithet for an industry that has been beset with economic woes, even before this COVID-19 pandemic, yet it is also one of the first lines of employment to hit the rocks. Retrenchment happens. To me, too.
So I went on by taking on writing gigs, and contributing my words where they earn me bread.
Along the way, I sought to share what blessings I still have — I also express myself with food prepared in my kitchen, by my hands. I sent out edible love to my family of friends, because face-to-face meetups have been on hold for half a year.
These lovely people photographed my gifts of food and put them on Facebook and the rest is quite quickly becoming history. I got PMs asking if I was selling my cooking. Some already included requests for favorites of theirs. So my daughters and I decided to take the opportunity to put their business acumen, my capital and communications skills, and our combined kitchen prowess together.
Hello, Happy Kitchen. We now sell meatloaves, ginger-garlic sauce, cupcake-sized baked cheesecakes, and chicken liver pate by order, at as reasonable a set of prices as we can, this being a pandemic and all.
We are going back to the oldest reliable form of employment we have known. If my mother’s family tales of how the Tan family of Ormoc came to become a clan are true, then I am the great-great-great granddaughter of a Chinese man from Fujian named Tan Buco, who was sent to the Philippines by his mother to find his father, who’d left China to seek employment in the Philippines. Tan Buco’s father had landed in Mindanao, and likely married into the family of Datu Piang, according to my maternal uncles. Tan Buco never found him, because he landed in the port of what would later become Ormoc City, on the island of Leyte.
Tan Buco, so the story goes, was a dutiful son who decided to take up the slack his dad left: He found a way to earn money by making and selling dimsum on the streets of Ormoc, sending money to his mother in China, saving some money for himself, and putting money aside to purchase land so he could wed his intended, a peninsulares lass of Basque Spanish ancestry whom he’d seen combing her mane of fiery red curls on the azotea of a rich haciendero’s house on the main street of the town.
He’d boldly gone up to the front door to ask if he could court the comely young lass. Her mother tersely told Tan Buco that she would only accept his courtship of her daughter if he could prove he had land and could support the young lady in the style to which she’d been raised.
Tan Buco sold his cooking all over Ormoc’s streets, from before dawn broke to after sundown. He cooked them in a bamboo steamer he’d made by hand, cut from the lush bamboo that grew everywhere there at the time. He was a one-man dimsum commissary making siopao (steamed meat buns), cuapao, siomai (pork and shrimp dumplings in rice paper wrappers), and steamed vegetable buns. Within a year, he’d acquired enough land titles to woo his intended.
When Tan Buco wed his bride, she made this decree at the church doors: “We shall eat your Chinese food. But we will never speak your heathen language. We will speak Spanish.” And that’s how my mother’s family came to be native speakers of Spanish and Cebuano who loved cooking and eating Chinese fare.
Tan Buco’s lineage includes a senator (Carlos Tan) and a congressman (Dominador Tan), whose political careers were powered by the land and wealth Tan Buco built from one modest bamboo steamer, and many, many thousands of dimsum he cooked and sold tirelessly to support his mother and siblings in China, and to win a bride and keep her happy. At one time, his clan comprised the largest set of blood-related land-owners in Ormoc City, which became a chartered city through the efforts of his great-grandson, Dominador Tan.
My mother told this story to me as if it was a talisman that would give her luck. She was the woman behind Remy Food Products, makers of quality tocino (sweet-savory pork), beef tapa, and longanisa (sweet garlic and pork sausages).
My mother began by selling eggs from door to door. She had three sons then (Jose, Tirso Jr., and Enrique), and a little daughter named Maria Cielo to support. I wasn’t born yet, so I am going by my mom’s telling of things. She and my Dad were renting an apartment in what is now San Juan City. Mom took out a loan of Php100 from her aunt, and began that business of selling eggs, then built up capital to go into the business of processed meats.
By the time I came to be, Mom and Dad had built a house with marble floors and adobe walls on Rosemallow Road, in Sun Valley Subdivision, in what is now Paranaque City.
My mother was the project development, and sales and marketing, genius. My father tended to the back office work of hiring workers for production, overseeing production, and making sure the deliveries were on the mark. By the time I was a toddler, Remy Food Products was supplying 100kg each of tapa, tocino and longanisa to all the five-star hotels of Metro Manila, four supermarkets, and several smaller groceries, plus several hundred kilos of deboned and stuffed chicken gallantina each Christmas season.
Her food business took a downturn when her mother, Consuelo Tan-Segovia, fell ill with aggressive breast cancer and needed a radical double mastectomy. Even in the mid 1970s, cancer treatments were extremely expensive. We had to give up the house to pay for my grandmother’s medical bills, and, later, her funeral, for she lost her valiant battle with cancer. Mom kept the business anyway, and rented a commissary in Makati.
The only reason she ended Remy Food Products was because my brothers asked her to stop, to stay home and be mom to us. She did this gladly until she thought of putting up a crocheted garments business that, eventually, exported blouses, dresses, placemats, doilies, glass-holders, coasters and whole tablecloths crocheted from fine cotton and silk thread to Japan.
You could say business is in my blood, particularly the food business. When times are hard, my parents liked to remind me, you have to have good skills for surviving long enough to thrive again.
So, here I am, with an accidental business that, three weeks after my daughters and I started it, is pushing us to the fullest capacity of our little home kitchen. I actually had to sink money into a new refrigerator for it. It is like slipping back into the good old days when I used to help my mother with her business: Familiar, home, still a very big part of who I am.
When times are hard, you trot out everything you’ve got to make it across the raging river of difficulty and uncertainty. For now, I cook, and sell my cookery.
Hello, pandemic, I am not backing down from you. Vamos, this journalist and writer can cook.
