“Is This Real for Me?”

A conversation with author Jill Damatac on mythology, recipes, and legibility.

Jill Damatac’s book Dirty Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family is important for the story it tells of what happened to her family when they became undocumented in the U.S., but it’s also important for how she weaves mythology and recipes into the narrative, all working together to create an experience in which food is not the purpose but instead the backbone: which is what it usually is, right? Eater writer Bettina Makalintal guest-hosted, as I thought she would be a wonderful pairing with Jill and get into the text very differently than I could—and I was right. Below, there is the video, audio, and text transcript of the conversation.

Jill: “I think my first criteria in terms of what recipes to include was, Do I actually eat this? Do I like it? Do I actually have memories of eating this? Like, is this real for me? And then from there, figuring out what dish goes with which.

For instance, initially that first chapter was going to be I think goat Kalderetang, not Pinikpikan. And because that was what my dad liked—Kaldereta is said to be a dish that was refined by the Ilocos region, which is where my dad's family is from. And I just thought, Okay, well, there's that regional link, and I'll go with that. But it didn't feel like there was a deeper symbolic link to my dad's story in terms of, you know, his youth and growing up in the Marcos regime. And I just needed it to add more meaning. And it wasn't doing that, for instance. So I had to cut it and rewrite it all together, and I actually included rewriting that chapter at the end of the book.

It's a lot of trial and error. There's a lot of dishes that I wish could have made it in, like Filipino barbecue, or Kinilaw, or Pinakbet, which is a vegetarian dish that I happen to love. They didn't make the cut simply because there just wasn't anything I could tie to the narrative in a deeper and broader symbolic sense.

At one point I wasn't sure if, for instance, the kare-kare, lengua kare-kare, was going to work. And then I thought, Well, actually, it would work, because this is, this is about assimilating, too—the bending of the tongue to change accents and learning how to speak like an American.”