How I hacked my late Mom’s secret sauce recipe

Marvi Torres
Sep 7, 2018 · 6 min read
Photo from Pixabay

I can’t name a family dish that I can, by default, bring to pot luck parties in December. Our menudo is too sweet; our adobo, too salty. Our noodles too bland and our barbecue too chewy. In my mind, I reassured myself that my mother was a lot of things, but she’s just not a cook.

My lunches in school weren’t as interesting as my friends’: I usually opened my lunch box to find two sad pieces of fried pork chop on top of slightly overcooked white rice. The meat was dry and tough, with only a hint of salt for flavor. If I was lucky, I would also find a packet of fast food ketchup at the bottom of my lunch box.

To say that my mother didn’t do magic in the kitchen is an understatement: she never did anything in the kitchen. But she did a lot of things for us. She instilled the value of oral hygiene by brushing our teeth in turn every night, pajama-clad siblings and vacationing cousins in a queue to the bathroom sink. She hosted sleepovers very graciously, assigning each of our friends and classmates a mattress and a little nook in the living room, even if we claimed that we would be working on our class projects all night and wouldn’t need to sleep. She managed and expanded the household budget by selling rice, ice cream, chicken, bread, clothes, jewelry, or whatever was en vogue to sell at the moment. I would argue that all of her magic lay in her ability to sell anything.

It is in in one of her entrepreneurial pursuits that I discovered one kitchen-related ability of hers. When I was seven, my mother set up a small diner across my school. It was called, unimaginatively, Marvi’s Canteen, as I wasn’t consulted prior to the business name registration. She sold porridge — locally called lugaw — in the dine-in eatery, and because the place was located across the school beside a church, it was a big hit.

My mother didn’t make the lugaw. She hired three assistants to do the cooking and the serving as she peddled the lugaw to students, teachers, churchgoers, most of whom she knew by first name.

Needless to say, my mother’s recipe produced a thin rice soup with the light hint of ginger. But the secret of the lugaw was not in the porridge itself — it was in the sauce that came with it. The sauce was inelegantly served in a tiny plastic bowl that I was sometimes asked to bring to the monoblock tables. I did so dutifully, knowing that if they ate the lugaw without it, they would never come back to buy more.

My mother made this sauce, which I loved even as a child. I would watch her make it in the diner kitchen, but as I could barely see over the tile counter, I couldn’t tell what liquid she was pouring into the bowl or what herb she was chopping. I knew that when she had sprinkled some pepper over the sauce, I had to step aside from where I was holding on to the countertop because it was time to serve the food.

The diner had already closed when I began to wonder what was in the sauce. Rainy days at home meant the help would be making lugaw, and I would ask my mother to please make the sauce. As my taste buds matured, I discovered that the same dipping sauce worked well with fried tofu, which by itself had a good protein-y texture but no flavor.

Whenever I asked her what was in it, all she would say was that it was vinegar. But why was the color dark, I would insist. Because it has soy sauce, she would say. It also had sugar, fish sauce, onion, chili, salt, and pepper. I was tall enough to see that she put all of these in the bowl, and I was old enough to know that the smell was horrible. Still, I cannot eat my lugaw or tofu without a generous helping of this mysterious sauce.

It had a bite to it, I would say. It was sour and salty and sweet and spicy and savory all at the same time. I would eat it with a spoon like soup, and the acidity would burn the upper portion of my stomach, but it was so good.

In my teens, I finally attempted to make it myself. It was raining early on a weekend morning. Somebody was already making lugaw in the kitchen, and Mother was still in bed. She was a big woman, so I couldn’t haul her out of bed by force. I lay beside her, and tried to negotiate a deal for her to please make the sauce for me. I tugged at a lock of her hair, poked her repeatedly, shook her shoulders. Please, please, please.

Make it yourself! she whined and turned her body to the other side of the bed. I knew what was in it, but I didn’t know how much of each ingredient I needed and in what order to put them. Equal parts for all liquids, she said and pretended to go back to sleep. I ran to the kitchen.

It was horrible! She knew this after finally getting out of bed. In her condescending motherly fashion, she repaired the sauce that I made, knowing exactly what it needed after only one sip of the terrible, and possibly poisonous, potion. As a student of science, I couldn’t understand why she would say equal parts when she clearly meant unequal parts. In a flurry, she used a spoon to transfer what seemed to be random amounts of soy sauce. But I kept mum when she set the sauce in front of me at the dining table. I tasted it, and my upper digestive tract burned delightfully.

When my mother passed away, we discovered that she had left a note: bank accounts, titles, and information on where we can find them. She, in her scratchy handwriting I had inherited, detailed the procedure on insurance claims and funeral services. Given all the thought she had put into it, I sometimes wondered if she finally left me the recipe for her dipping sauce. But then I would remember: my mother was lot of things, but she was never the cook.

I haven’t had that sauce since she passed, so last week, I decided to finally get to the bottom of it. I had always suspected that I knew how much of this and that I needed but just never committed to make it myself because everything your mother made just tasted better. And I was right. With very little adjustments, I came up with the following recipe.

  • 10 parts vinegar
  • 1 part soy sauce
  • 1.25 parts fish sauce
  • 1.5 parts sugar
  • Pinch of salt
  • 1 bird’s eye chili, crushed
  • As many bulbs of onion as you want, in my case, two, chopped
  • Generous amounts of pepper

My mother was precise about one thing: mix them all together in a bowl. The resulting sauce had the infamous bite to it. It was sour and salty and sweet and spicy and savory all at once. It tasted like rainy days and reminded me of my mother’s early morning laziness that I encouraged by cuddling up to her in bed.

And because I had the urge to contribute something to the family recipe, I added some pork floss. It turned the sauce into a sludge, and it’s absolutely gross, but it gave the sauce a meaty kick. The pork floss also soaked up some of the acid, and that’s good because I had to eat the sauce without lugaw, which I had no idea how to make. Like my mother, I like to think that I am many things, but I can never, ever cook.

(Written in 2012)

Written by

Sales, marketing, and communications practitioner. Will write for food. Check out my new blog at www.marvitorres.com

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