WHO cooks well, who writes well, who blogs well is always a subject for debate; but there is one thing everyone agrees on in the Philippine foodie world: Doreen Fernandez is our rock. In fact, there is a kind of reverence for her much like the admiration among singers for Lea Salonga, or respect among newscasters for Tina Monzon Palma, or the awe with which dancers regard Lisa Macuja. She is the woman who, through her writing, engaged readers in her many joyous eating expeditions, educated even the most knowledgeable of food writers on food as culture, and encouraged everyone to simply love Filipino food.

Doreen was a professor at the Ateneo. So while I am a proud La Sallite (animo!) and appreciate Cirilo Bautista, I do wish that I had the honor of being inspired and honed by her as a student/writer. Alas, my only glimpse of her was as a fledgling segment producer for the leisure beat of ?Good Morning Asia? (predecessor of ?Unang Hirit?).

I remember how Myrna Segismundo, already celebrated as far back as 1997 as the executive chef of PCI Bank?s Sign of the Anvil, was ready to startle our senses at Zu (wow, memories) at the Shangri-la. Press kits had been distributed and we were midway through the menu when Doreen Fernandez made her entrance. And like the queen had arrived, the entire cast and crew of that evening?s production dropped the rest of us and flocked to her, ready to please her every whim and holding their breath in anticipation of what she might say. I had no clue then who she was; I thought she was just some rich woman.

It was only years later, upon doing research for a food article that I was writing, that I would find out why. Her work as a food writer, historian and anthropologist is truly exceptional.

Take her essay, ?Here?s to Spirited Holidays? (Tikim, p. 14-17, 1994). She doesn?t just gush on the pleasures of drinking alcohol. In convincing the reader to consider local liquor, she elaborates on the varieties of Philippine spirits from region to region:

?Here in the Philippines, many have a tendency to call anything with alcohol content ?alak?, our generic name for wine, liquor, distillates, alcohol. Thus there is alak sa niyog, coconut wine like lambanog; alak sa sasa, nipa wine like laksoy; alak sa tubo, sugarcane wine like basi; alak sa sintunes or citrus/orange wine; and alak sa ubas, grape wine. Umiinom sa alak is to drink any of the above and other drinks like tapuy, the rice wine of the Cordilleras, tuba young or old (bahal), whiskey, champagne, beer, Ginebra, or even sioctong, the Chinese medicinal wine made from rice.?

But to prove that she is not just a walking Philippine food encyclopedia, she also delves deeper into Philippine culture and shares how food plays a part in our everyday lives:

?In the Philippines, we especially connect it with the holidays: brandy, whisky and rum in the fruitcakes we adapted from the American tradition; tinto, vino blanco, sidra, and champan with the food we learned from the Spanish tradition. Most of us have not quite connected the above with our own tradition of wines from the native environment: the basing lalake and basing babae from sugarcane, the tapuy and baya from rice, the tuba and lambanog from coconut sap, and the growing varieties of wines from our fruits (duhat, bignay, etc.).?

And that is just one of her many elaborate and highly educational essays. Makes this food writer feel very much like a Padawan to her Yoda!

Like a doting mother (grandmother?), she also sends us gentle reminders of traditions that those before us honored and might consider respecting. She describes Noche Buena as the ?night of goodness,? and reminds us why: ?because, says my mother Dr. Alicia Lucero Gamboa, no one was allowed to eat till after midnight mass; one fasted, especially from meat, for the feast early on Christmas morning.? Does anyone even remember that we?re supposed to fast before midnight on Christmas Eve?

She was also the Philippine Zagat, with her book Lasa (written with Edilberto Alegre) enumerating the restaurants in the Metro, but not just with brief three liners on the restaurant but entire page reviews. These books, already out of print but miraculously found in some antique shop by The Producer, share the history of a lot of our favorite restaurants, some of which are not even around anymore. Who knew that Aristocrat ?was established in 1936 by Mrs. Engracia Reyes as an ambulant food cart?? Who knew that Mario?s ?started out as a pizza place in Baguio in 1971?? These are only some of the stories that our parents will remember which Doreen Fernandez jotted down for future generations to know.

And she traveled the country purposely to appreciate the many flavors our islands have to offer. Proof of this, aside from her essays is her 132-pager on just one dish/method of cooking: Kinilaw (Kinilaw, 1991), complete with a ?Kinilaw Ecology Grid,? which is a table of how kilawin/kinilaw is prepared from Batanes to Tawi-Tawi.

So before everyone became a food expert by virtue of the blogging society and travel and food shows, there was Doreen Fernandez. Historian, anthropologist, writer. But above all, the original foodie. ?