True Colors

The excessive partiality for fair skin displayed by certain of my relations is a constant source of amusement and exasperation to me. How excessive? One of the first things the senior ladies of the clan tend to check out with newborn babies is their coloring. Take my mom. When my youngest son was born, she declared that he was darker than his brothers. How much darker? About the difference between milk and cream.

In a country where the majority of the citizens are either moreno or kayumanggi, it’s an attitude that’s as out of place as Spaghetti alla Puttanesca and Oeufs à la Neige on the same menu as sinigang, daing na bangus and green mangoes with bagoong.

It isn’t as if we belong to that minority that looks as if they just came over from the Iberian Peninsula. We’re mostly fair-complexioned but we would never be mistaken for westerners. Yet one of the worst things anyone can say about an addition to the clan is to describe him or her as dusky. The exception seemed to be my father who didn’t care if a person is black, white or multi-colored. I guess to a doctor, skin is, well, skin.

My eldest son was very fair at birth. But within a few weeks, Bryan’s skin turned ruddy. His pediatrician assured us that many newborns undergo this change and that my son’s color would eventually return to its original hue. But weeks passed and there was no discernable change. Needless to say, my mother became very concerned.

During a party, a family friend asked to see the new baby. So Bryan was brought out to be examined and admired. The friend, who had an emphatic, singsong way of speaking, happily warbled, “What a daaarling baby!” Unfortunately, she paused for breath between the syllables “dar” and “ling” and thereby gave Mom an awful fright. She thought her friend was about to say, “What a daaark baby!”

It’s funny but also tiresome. I remember going to the beach as a kid and we girls being garbed in long-sleeved, turtleneck tops and old stretch pants whenever we ventured into the sea. (In fact, it’s still the beachwear of choice for some of my aunts who have since added wide-brimmed hats, umbrellas and scarves to their seaside ensembles.) Sunblock was not enough as far as our respective mothers were concerned.

Can you imagine trying to frolic in waterlogged garments? Or attempting to look cool walking along the shore while dressed for a mountain hike? Only when we entered our late teens were we able to assert ourselves and wear what we pleased. We must have been the only teenagers who rebelled by wearing appropriate apparel.

Woe to anyone who adopted the tanned look. Our ever-vigilant guardians were horrified that anyone would deliberately tarnish the fairness one was so fortunate to be born with. And if any of the guys brought home a girlfriend who was born on the wrong end of the color scale, he never heard the end of it. They were a little more lenient about boyfriends however. Maybe that had to do with the “tall, dark and handsome” cliché.

I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, this is a country where a good number of people mourned the closure of U.S. military bases for reasons that had nothing to do with national interest, skin-whitening products abound and flourish and gluthathione is now part of the national vocabulary.

Yet for all the poor attempts at pseudo-American twangs and western manners of speech, many stubbornly retain their Filipino-ness on the inside, old habits and traditions included, both the good and the appalling.

When my sister and I went on our first trip to Europe, we were often sorely tempted to throttle our tour companions. They kept complaining that they wanted sinangag with tapa or longganisa in lieu of the continental breakfasts that were the norm. Never mind that it was next to impossible to find Filipino foodstuffs in the European capitals, let alone the countryside. Or that one of the ways to appreciate a foreign culture is to partake of what it offers, including the pertinent cuisine.

Of course, there’s also the illogical human trait of wanting what one doesn’t have. Like the impulse to curl straight hair and straighten curly locks. Or snub-nosed folks having nose jobs to make themselves appear more “patrician,” small-breasted women allowing implants in their bodies in order to look bustier and fair-complexioned people risking skin cancer every summer trying to burn themselves into the color a good many Filipinos already possess.

That last habit is one my mom and aunts find incomprehensible even when its effectiveness as bait for the opposite sex is proved time and again. This was clearly demonstrated when a good friend and her older sister went on a tour of continental Europe.

Our friend’s sister tans fabulously and she had just spent a week in Boracay before embarking on the tour. Guess who garnered the lion’s share of male attention? It puzzled the clan matriarchs when they learned that French hunks and Italian studs avidly ogled her while her übermestiza sister, who always caught everyone’s eyes back home, was largely ignored. It was the golden girl, not the porcelain doll, who came home glowing from a surfeit of masculine adulation.

To be fair, this propensity for white western complexions does not extend to white western lifestyles. Most of my relations live in eclectically designed homes with both our local heritage and foreign influences reflected in the architecture and décor. For daily food fare, they will choose local over foreign more often than not. Ditto for language usage, familial relationships and the observance of local customs.

Still, they continue to admire white skin and they will probably do so for the foreseeable future. But time has a way of mellowing perceptions and they’ve begun to tone down that admiration a bit. Thankfully, their use of derogatory labels to describe dark-skinned people is on the decline. Whether this is from a sense of shame or simply because their children keep correcting them, I don’t know. But it is a welcome change and perhaps things will continue to improve. The occasional stings of backlashes to their biases don’t hurt either. But it does seem take them a fair amount of time to learn. Decades, in fact.

One summer in the sixties, my parents and some of my mom’s cousins traveled together to the United States on business. Naturally they also toured the country whenever possible. They even managed to visit the Deep South. At the time, segregation was still in place with whites and blacks occupying widely different niches in society.

At one point, they had to travel by Greyhound. The bus driver was delighted to have them on board. Why? Because he had the perfect buffer between the white passengers who sat in the front of the bus and the blacks who occupied the back. The Filipino group was placed in the center of the bus to keep the two groups nicely separated. That was an object lesson in how far racial prejudice can be taken. And it wasn’t the only one. Unfortunately, they didn’t take them to heart at the time.

My parents recounted a stopover they made at a small town along the way. As soon as they got off the bus, they headed for the restrooms. Imagine their consternation when they were confronted with signs that said “White” and “Colored.”

Where did they belong? Strictly speaking, they weren’t white. Did that mean that they would have to use the, shudder, “Colored” restroom? In the end, they chose to use the “White” facilities rather than admit the inadmissible. But that could have landed them in a most unwelcome predicament.

One of my uncles could not be deemed fair by any stretch of the imagination. Had there been someone present to enforce the law, he would have been compelled to use the “Colored” restroom. The rest would have had to follow suit to spare him the embarrassment of being singled out.

Now that would have been poetic justice.

One Man’s Shake is Another Man’s Frappe

Whenever we go to Starbucks, Bryan, Niccolo and Jonathan order the frapuccinos. Invariably, I wish they hadn’t become so fond of these expensive concoctions that are little more than glorified milkshakes. Particularly when I can whip them up at home at less cost and with fresh ingredients.

Smoothie, frappe, velvet, frosted shake, malt, cabinet and batido are all one and the same—a milkshake going by another name depending on region or country and what goes into the recipe. But basically, a milkshake is a cold beverage made from milk, ice cream or other similar dairy products and flavorings ranging from fruit syrups to chocolate sauce. It’s generally meant to be drank but there are recipes where the shake is so thick a spoon is more useful than a straw. In the 1950s in the United States, such a shake was aptly called a concrete and was handed to the customer upside down to demonstrate its drip-proof consistency. So does that make the Dairy Queen Blizzard a concrete treat?

Interestingly enough, the milkshake originated in the U.S. as an alcoholic whiskey drink. The name first appeared in print in 1885 and was similar to eggnog. And just like its soda fountain compatriot Coca Cola, it was positioned as a health tonic. By 1900, however, the name referred to dairy-based drinks made with chocolate, strawberry or vanilla syrup. It was solely made with milk and shaken or whipped until foamy. Hence the term milkshake. (Talk about taking names literally.) Anyway, within a few years, people wanted ice cream in the new drink as well and the basic shake in its current incarnation appeared.

What differentiates a milkshake from a frappe or smoothie? Well, in the first place, even milkshakes are not born equal. While the most common version consists of milk, ice cream and a flavoring, in the New England states and some Commonwealth nations, they adhere a bit more to tradition and there is no ice cream in the shake, only iced milk.

By and large, the variations in name have to do with its region of origin or with the changes or additions in the basic recipe. For example, a frosted shake is a milkshake to which ice cream has been added. In the 1930s, the newspapers used the term ‘frosted’ for any beverage that had ice cream added to it. Even hot coffee with ice cream added to it was called a frosted coffee.

Now take away the ice cream and substitute yogurt, crushed ice and fresh fruit and you have the health buff’s favorite treat, the smoothie. Add malted milk to the basic shake and you’ll wind up with a classic malted milkshake or simply a malt. An extra thick milkshake came to be called a velvet or frappe (pronounced ‘frap’) in northern New England and Canada. The term frappe comes from French frapper, meaning ‘to ice’. In Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts, locals are fond of their coffee frappe shake. (When I read this, the frapuccino began to make sense.) By the way, once you add ice cream to a milkshake in this particular region it becomes peculiarly enough, a cabinet, probably named after the square wooden cabinet in which the mixer used to be encased.

The concept of milkshakes also migrated south of the border. Add fruit to a milkshake and you have the batido, which is very popular in Latin America and among Miami’s extensive Cuban expatriate community. Nicaraguans even coined their own name—they call their milkshake leche malteada.

In the 1940s and 50s, soda fountains were favorite hangouts in the U.S. and milkshakes often formed the base of their ice cream menus. Soda fountain staff, or jerks as they were called, had their own jargon for these milky concoctions, some nicely descriptive, others quite bizzare and incomprehensible. A “White Cow” was a vanilla milkshake while a “Burn One All the Way” was a chocolate malted with chocolate ice cream. The whimsically named “Shake One in the Hay” was a simple strawberry shake. But the “Twist It, Choke It and Make It Cackle” needs a bit of circular reasoning to connect it to what the shake was: a chocolate malted with an egg.

In the Philippines, milkshakes are often bought as a dessert or a cold treat to sip while strolling around on a warm day. But in North America, it was discovered that nearly half of all milkshakes are bought in the early morning and are usually the only items purchased per customer. The reason? It makes an ideal breakfast product for the commute from home to work or school because it can be consumed with just one hand and there is little risk of spillage on clothes or soiling the hands, as is the case with sandwiches or pastries.

Nowadays, the plethora of milkshake variations can be bewildering. Everything from the basic milk and ice cream version to fruit- or candy-studded, spiked and gourmet concoctions are on hand. Anything from M&Ms, peanut butter and jelly, Hostess Twinkies, melted caramels and crushed Oreos to crème de menthe and Kahlúa liqueur, whiskey and vodka to macerated strawberries, Valrhona chocolate, saffron-rose water and taro root have found their way into today’s shakes. Going by this, I suppose even the once ubiquitous pearl drinks can pass as milkshakes.

I once used leftover ice cream to make milkshakes for my three sons. I followed the most popular recipe—cold milk, ice cream and a flavoring, chocolate syrup in this case. I got the thumbs up from all three with Bryan claiming there’s nothing like homemade, Jonathan stating that it was the best milkshake he’d ever tasted and Niccolo simply and enthusiastically saying “Delicious!” and asking for a second serving.

Hmmm, maybe if I do this often enough, their clamor for costly commercial shakes will go the way of the dodo. Well, I can dream, can’t I?