Pinapaitan

Harold Liban says:

My immigrant parents came from Solano, Nueva Vizcaya, and Angadanan, Isabela Provinces in the Cayagan Valley of Northern Luzon, Philippines. They were indigenous Gaddangs, not Ilocano. I want to emphasize “Gaddang”, my indigenous ancestral tribe’s name, because whenever I was asked by new Filipino friends where my parents came from and I tell them, they instinctively think I’m an Ilocano, the dominant group of people in those provinces since after 1860.

My father’s profession was cooking, at our family home (mom cooked at home too). My father was the best known cook among the Gaddangs during his lifetime in San Francisco. When I was a young boy in the 1940s growing up in San Francisco, I used to accompany my father to shop in Chinatown for fresh pork, beef, freshly dressed chickens (father selected the ones he wanted from a cage of chickens) at the only butcher shop he preferred where bile, and blood were also sold, and other markets for fresh Chinese vegetables. At home father always cooked Papaitan (I think the word Pinapaitan is an Ilocano word) and that’s the way father pronounced it without the letters “Pina”. The best description I recall was the kind of tripe father used in his Papaitan which looked like tiny black finger-like protrusions, as in a floor carpet. This black tripe cut in small strips cooked with bile and his special seasonings always turns out to be a tasty treat (masarap). I acquired the bitter taste for papitan, and the taste of bittermelon (an Asian / Filipino vegetable called “Ampalaya”) since my childhood days into adulthood when father was still alive. I’m not certain if my siblings liked papaitan, but I know they do like ampalaya. When I used to tell my children what that black meat was, they made a distorted face cringing at the thought of me eating animal innerds. I have tasted other cooks papaitan, but none as good as my father’s recipe. Since my father’s death in the 1970s, I haven’t eaten any Papaitan. My wives didn’t like it either, only me.

Chef Pol Nepomuceno, Chef Andy Adra, First Cook Pete V. Liban my father was one of three cooks at the world reknowned Shadows (Bavarian) Restaurant on Upper Montgomery Street, were all Filipinos cooking the German Cuisine.

It's a Long Way from Hawai'i Nei says:

The stupidest thing my sister and I ever did was not pay attention to my dad’s cooking when we were younger. Our dad was an awesome cook and we never gave a thought to what would happen when he would inevitably pass. Oh, he tried to teach us, alright, but there was always something more interesting or more important than spending time in the kitchen with him passing those skills down to us. We somehow took it for granted that this great food would always be there. That inevitable day did come to pass and reality shortly hit us like a ton of bricks. It’s been 30 years now since his passing and we have, through trial and error, and reaching back into the fog of our childhood trying to piece together whatever our memory allows us, managed to copy, but not never duplicate, our dad’s time-honed skills in the kitchen.

Pinapaitan was one of our favorites. I know, this is a “Hard Core” Filipino dish. I think it’s one of those things that you have to have grown-up with to appreciate. My doctor doesn’t really care for me eating this stuff (he kind of recoiled when I told him how much I love this dish!). I gotta laugh, though. I live in a sparsely populated state out West and people like me are very few and far between in these parts. People would be horrified if they ever knew what I concoct on a regular basis in my kitchen. This is true “Comfort Food”, especially this time of year when the snow’s piling up outside and temperatures are south of Zero. I wouldn’t have it any other way.