Sunday, January 10, 2010
Food Chain / Music / Food & Drink Hellbent for Cooking: Sinigang na Baboy
Posted by Philip Montoro on 01.10.10 at 10:09 PM
- Sinigang na Baboy
But I didn't want to write about the book until I'd tried one of the recipes, and I didn't manage that till Saturday. I made a Filipino sour pork-rib stew called sinigang na baboy, the contribution of Voltaire 666 of Deiphago, a black-metal trio formed in Manila in 1989 and now based in Costa Rica. "A recipe from our pagan fathers," he calls it. "Simple, cannibal-style cooking: all in one pot!"
Considering how complicated the stew's flavor was, it had few ingredients: tamarind (whole pods simmered in the pork broth, then crushed and sieved), onion, tomato, daikon, green beans, chilies, salt, and fresh greens (I chose wrapped-heart Chinese mustard, dai gai choy, because I was at Golden Pacific and I wanted something bitter and peppery). I used a cut of pork ribs with the belly skin still on it, and the stew turned out so rich with liquid fat that the leftovers solidified in the fridge. That'll keep your coat shiny!
Anyway. Next I'm thinking of trying the llapingachos, contributed by Grimorium Verum, the first black-metal band from Ecuador—they're basically griddled potato-and-cheese cakes with peanut cream. Or maybe the "whiskey demon bacalao" from Gunnar Hansen of Norway's Faustcoven. He suggests adding a shot of smoky Islay scotch to the last round of soaking water for the salted stock fish, which sounds great. And while the dish simmers, he recommends you listen to Hellhammer's Triumph of Death on repeat, "giving small, evil vibrations to the stew." Done and done.
Comments (3)
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"and only the most grim and frostbitten of poseurs worry about how it'd look if they had a laugh."
Whaaaaat? Those are the truly sincere ones, not the poseurs. Open the door to a sense of humor in metal and you're in Tenacious D land before you know it. It's as bad a category mistake as synthesizers in country music.
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As a rebuttal, I offer the video to Meshuggah's "New Millennium Cyanide Christ." Straight faces all around, but this is hardly serious business:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A_tSyJBsRQ
I don't mean that the music itself is jokey, and I agree that metal that's trying to be funny is a risky proposition. (Though thrashers like Municipal Waste can pull it off.)
I just think that it's a bad sign if a metalhead doesn't feel he can display a sense of humor outside his music (like, say, in a cookbook) because he thinks he's got to be brutal 24/7. If you try to suppress a natural part of your human nature, what will that do to the long-term health of your creative enterprises?
My favorite recipe is the Black Metal Berry Pie by Australian black thrash band Sadistik Execution. The best line goes like:
"It is preferable to make your own pastry, or you can buy readymade stuff if you are poser. If you are making the pastry, ask a girl how to put it together.
"
P.S. The Magus and K.A.O.S. (by Sadistik Execution) are amazing black thrash albums.
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