Past Food

When our friend, Peter Ting, invited my wife and I (and another friend, IreneDy) to have lunch in Chinatown I was excited! My thoughts immediately flew back to the late 1970s when I was working at Allied Bank in Escolta which is within walking distance to where we were headed now.

I remember one of my officemates, Edgar Maldonado, bringing this mouth-watering pastry to our workplace almost on a weekly basis. A couple of years later our office moved to the Makati district and with that came the end of our once a week affair with this fabulous food.

"Do you know a place where we can get kuchay-ah?" I asked Peter as we crossed Jones bridge.

"Of course!" he replied. 

Our lunch at Chuan Ki was sumptuous (and cheap!). It was capped by a lotus seed filled mooncake. Normally mooncakes have mashed mung beans as their filling and it was a pleasant, tasty delight to discover that lotus is much more delicious.

After lunch we strolled the streets of Chinatown. We made a short stop at Lord Stow's where I bought 6 pieces of their world famous egg tart. 

Next stop was the kuchay-ah store. Cynthia warned me that it may not be the same as what I had decades ago so we played it safe and just bought two pieces.

The drive back home was full of nostaglia as we passed my old high school which looked so much different now than when I was studying there. The roads we took were the roads that I walked on 50 years ago and frankly I couldn't recognize them anymore. So much have changed - they were now more crowded and noisier. Half a century ago when I walked from school, these streets were relatively quiet and with only a few people sharing the road with me. The sidewalks were wide and clean. My classmates and I would run for a kilometer without bumping into anything. Sadly that's no longer possible now. Street vendors and hundreds of pedestrians ply the sidewalk while tricycles, jeepneys and private vehicles battle for road space in trying to get to their respective destinations.

We eventually got home after almost two hours of negotiating Manila's traffic. Later that evening, I prepared myself, taking a deep breath while two tantalizing kuchay-ahs lay in front of me. I tried to remember the taste of what my officemates and I shared four decades ago. Even the shape of the pastries before me does not connect to the visions of the past. I looked at my wife who was curiously staring at me. I held one of the kuchay-ahs and took a bite. Cynthia's eyes grew wider as I savored the strange taste of sauteed meat and veggies inside the bread-like crust.

"Well?" my wife couldn't bear the suspense any longer.

"It's delicious" I confirmed to her, "but this was not how I remember it. Perhaps I have forgotten what the past food tasted like."

Nevertheless two modern day kuchay-ahs still passed through my mouth rather quickly.