Madeleine

Proust's most famous "involuntary memory" moment had to do with a madeleine dipped in tea. I was reminded of this literary bit while reading the final pages of J. Alvarez's "How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents," wherein Fifi wonders whether her memory would ever be involuntarily unleashed by textbook representations of the little statuette their maid, Chucha, held over their heads before the family absconded to New York.

As madeleine is to Proust, so tinola is to me. Tinola, chicken in gingery broth, always reminds me of rainy days, where the tropical typhoons would unleash so much fury, classes were canceled, roads flooded, and dozens of pails set out to catch the water dripping in through the roof. My sisters and I would do our rain dance, learned (incredibly) from Catholic school, to prolong the storm, which meant more days to spend lolling around the house, reading Sweet Valley twins or Nancy Drew or anything else but homework. Back when our cousins still lived with us, the empty room on the second floor of the house would be turned into a romp room. Despite the howling winds outside, we would throw open the windows, blast the radio, turn up the TV, and play video games the whole day.

Today was a tinola day, a gray, dreary, wet, cold, and bleh day. Mike was not feeling well, and even the cat was extra snuggly. I didn't have unripe papaya, which is added to the soup for sweetness. Neither did I have chili pepper leaves, added for bitterness, a perfect complement to the pungency of ginger. What I did have on hand was a bunch of chinese mustard greens -- slightly sweet stems, bitter leaves. Added to the chicken drumsticks browned with the garlic, onion, ginger, and fish sauce, it added the layer of flavor I had been looking for in all my other attempts at this dish.

Tinola with chinese mustrad greens