Straight from the hearth

Mamang’s dinengdeng

By Gloria Esguerra Melencio

The aromatic, salty smell of dinengdeng always remind me of Mamang, the stoic Ilocana grandmother who practically raised me while my father was away earning a living and my mother was busy raising my younger siblings. It is from her whom I learn to cook dinengdeng the Ilocano way that father would always request me to cook it for him whenever I go home.

“Kuha mo ang lasa ng dinengdeng ni Mamang,” he tells me to my mother’s delight who is saved from one more cooking of the regular family meal.

Brewing her concoction of ginger, tomatoes, red onions with sticky calabasa, rounded gourd, winged beans, eggplants, caturay flowers and other vegetables freshly picked from her well-tended garden, this dinengdeng is the family dish that connects me to my Ilocano roots in Pangasinan and La Union.

Its salty flavor overpowers the bitter, tangy, sour and sweetish tastes that the hot, steamed rice balances. It must be so adventurous playing with balled rice cupped in a small fist but Mamang’s sharp eyes are enough to scare me to eat dinengdeng with fork and spoon instead.

She tells me she cannot live without dinengdeng. My father says he feels weak when he cannot eat dinengdeng for at least once a week. It has been a regular fare that even my Visayan mother became used to its taste but never got to cook it the way Mamang does.

The Ilocano dinengdeng is similar to the Waraynon nilapwahan, or the Cebuano bas-oy, or the Ilongo lasua – sans the bagoong isda. Many years later, I would be able to cook vegetarian dinengdeng that tastes like my grandmother’s but combined with my mother’s favorite herb, tanglad, minus garlic and onion.

My husband and children love it all just the same even requesting me to cook it at times – as I pass the torch of cooking the family recipe to a child who loves cooking, who incidentally is a girl.

Mamang’s dinengdeng is as stoic as this old lady who had gone through life’s ups and downs, topping in the list was the Second World War that wreaked havoc to her own family and uprooted her forever.

It was bitter than the rounded gourd in her dinengdeng that she would be able to disclose it by bits and pieces only while I was growing up; Hers was more sour than the tomatoes in it as she had shed tears silently in darkness over broken relationships; Saltier than the bagoong isda as she tried to tide things over of what was left of the war; More pungent of the winged beans or the eggplant as she prayed to high heavens for her family’s scarred spirit; Sweeter than the calabasa or the camote, nevertheless, as she tried to pass on to me her hopes and dreams – that I managed to reclaim back in Mamang’s dinengdeng.