The Rich Tradition of Filipino Embutido (Published 2015) (2024)

Before she showed me how to make the egg-stuffed, raisin-speckled meatloaf of her Filipino youth, Emma Phojanakong took me to the curiously named Johnny Air Mart. It’s a Filipino store on the East Side of Manhattan near her home in Stuyvesant Town, its shelves crammed with instant Pinoy comforts: just-add-water noodle bowls with “artificial bone marrow flavor,” sugary breads folded around electric swaths of purple yam and, prominently, rows of canned meats: Pop the top, heat and eat. Nostalgia, I figured, is a hunger that wants to be fed now.

Emma was looking for calamansi, a fruit that tastes as if an orange and a lime eloped to the tropics, and she was glad that she could still find its frozen juice nearby; most of the Filipino shops in the neighborhood have been priced out by rents. There used to be a lot of quick feeds for Filipinos around here, from snack shelves to turo-turos, Tagalog for “point-point,” a perfect name for a kind of restaurant where you order with a hungry look and some hand gestures, words optional.

Amid the Old New York air of Gramercy, it was easy to miss that, for a few decades, this was one of the main Filipino neighborhoods in the city. From the ’60s to the ’80s, the hospitals along First and Second Avenues recruited nurses from the Philippines: English-speaking, familiar with American culture and willing to work for cheap, because cheap here still meant real money for the family they left behind. Johnny Air Mart’s name, it turns out, comes from the fact that Johnny Air was never meant to be a grocery in the first place; for 20 years, it was a shipping service for those nurses to send clothes, gifts and cash to people back home.

Emma was one of those nurses, and she has exactly the kind of smile you want to see if you are feeling ill and anxious. An orphan in the Philippines, she came here when she was 21, eventually becoming the president of a nurses’ association and her children’s PTA. She also became famous among her friends for her cooking, not least because of her steady hand in making chicken relleno, for which she would meticulously cut out the bird’s bones from under its skin and then stuff it with embutido, a sweet-savory souped-up meatloaf that comes out for Christmas and other festive occasions. (Ever resourceful, she once practiced this high art of bird butchery with a scalpel liberated from the O.R.)

My knife skills not being quite up to surgery, we settled on cooking her embutido together, in its original meat-log form. There’s a certain homely elegance to the dish, a rustic fanciness in rolling ground pork around boiled eggs so that, when sliced, there’s sunny yellow in the middle. But I was fascinated by the stuff that joined the pork party: raisins, sweet relish, ketchup, cheese and, of course, canned meats like Vienna sausages and smoked ham.