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Amuse Bouche 

 

Baked In: What memories are we making with bibingka? 

By: Margot Finn 

 

As I type this, the mix of onion, celery, and carrot we call mirepoix is softening on my 

stovetop, and sitting at the ready is a bowl full of the golden liquid strained from the 

chicken bones and leek tops that simmered all last night, scraps of previous meals 

squirreled away in the freezer in anticipation of a day much like this one. “Summer left like 

it owed someone money,” tweeted someone cleverer than I who must live in the same 

hemisphere on this year’s sharp and seemingly irrevocable descent into winter. My toddler 

has been uncharacteristically irritable and listless today, picking at her lunch and falling 

asleep on the couch in the middle of yet another screening of My Neighbor Totoro. Her older 

brother has come home from first grade sniffling for most of the last two weeks. He keeps 

testing negative for Covid, but the friend who’d planned to host a gathering of my book club 

tonight was not so lucky. So we’re all in need of a little comfort.  

 

I don’t remember if my mother ever made chicken noodle soup from scratch, although cans 

of Campbell’s version were a staple of our cupboard as well as Cup o’Noodles with the 

spongey, freeze-dried cubes of carrot and corn that stayed chewy even after being 

rehydrated. She definitely didn’t make bone broth. If her mother or my father’s mother did, 

I never heard about it, let alone witnessed it. Although I now think of making bone broth as 

among my “farm wife” practices, like saving the grease rendered from bacon and clarifying 

it for biscuits and pastry crust and baking yeast breads with a sourdough starter I call 

Ezekiel, I didn’t inherit any of these habits from the actual Nebraskan farm wives I am 

descended from.  

 

One of them was an excellent cook known especially for her pies, but her crusts always 

began with the can of Crisco my mom also kept in her pantry. The other, actually a rural 

electrician’s wife, was a reluctant and resentful home cook. The electrician infamously put 

grape jelly on everything she cooked to mask its original flavor. I suppose I did inherit from 

my grandmothers the tendencies that made me into the kind of person who acquires the 

habit of saving leftover chicken bones and leek tops and uses those to brew up liquid 

comfort for herself and others. Both of them married controlling men with bad tempers 

and were responsible for most of the domestic labor in their homes, including keeping the 

kids from making their father angry. But a tendency to tolerate, or perhaps seek, 

relationships with abusive and controlling men isn’t quite the same as a recipe. Or is it?   

 

Will my children save their leftover chicken bones and simmer them? Will they learn to do 

so from watching me, or will they cultivate the habit after leaving home, as I did, perhaps 



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having inherited a tendency to try to rescue the lonely? Will a can of Campbell’s or Cup 

o’Noodles be sufficient to evoke the steaming bowls of broth and noodles that we’ll eat 

together tonight? Will the memory of the three of us eating chicken noodle soup in the 

home I’ve tried to make for us, after absconding from my marriage to their father, be a 

comfort when they are older?   

 

Inheritance and identity are complicated enough when it comes to comforts as ubiquitous 

as chicken noodle soup, the most ethnically unmarked American take on the warm, savory, 

and usually poultry-based broth used as antidote for everything from the common cold and 

flu to hangovers and heartache the world over. From Greek avgolemono to Vietnamese pho, 

Chinese congee to “Jewish penicillin,” or in France, to the supposedly restorative broths that 

give the restaurant its name, this is how we try to feed people in need of comfort.  

 

During the pandemic, I started making bibingka with my kids, a kind of cake composed 

primarily of egg, coconut milk and rice flour that’s traditional to…I’m googling now, 

because my first impulse is to say Indonesia, but no, apparently, the Philippines. Clearly, 

although this has become a staple in our household, something my kids adore and which 

may be among the first things they can prepare on their own, I know nothing about the 

origins of this food. I do not know how it is typically enjoyed, nor how common or unusual 

it is in the Philippines, whether it’s usually homemade or purchased and if the latter, 

whether from supermarkets or bakeries or street vendors or all of the above. I don’t even 

remember where I stumbled on the recipe I first used, but I can tell you the precise day I 

made it for the first time because I posted the recipe on Facebook along with a picture of 

the dwarf tulips then blooming in the backyard: May 03, 2020, not yet two months into 

global awareness of the Covid-19 pandemic.  

 

 
Figure 1: Original Facebook post by the author. 



     Digest: A Journal of Foodways and Culture 9:2 (2022) 

 

105 

 

 
Figure 2: Facebook post with recipe by the author. 

 

Bibingka is (are? I go back and forth over whether the collective form should take an “s”) 

kin to the puffy oven pancakes I learned to make in high school after first encountering 

them under the name “Dutch baby” at a restaurant specializing in weekend brunch. I 

discovered a recipe in the battered copy of Betty Crocker that served as the ultimate 

cooking authority in our house.  Especially if there were occasion for a friend to sleep over, 

I delighted in introducing them to the phenomenon also familiar to home bakers of 

popovers or Yorkshire puddings, wherein a batter with a substantial portion of egg put into 

a pan generously greased with butter or fatty drippings from roasted meat expands rapidly 

in a cup-like shape when placed in a hot oven. They emerge, poofed up over the edges of 

the baking tin, with edges deeply brown and the center still pale and custardy. Unlike the 

Dutch baby, whose batter is typically not sweetened itself but either stuffed with apples 

and cinnamon or piled with powdered sugar and drizzled with lemon juice after coming 

out of the oven, the recipe I used called for as much palm sugar, by volume, as rice flour. 

I’ve always just used brown.  



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106 

 

 
Figure 3. Ingredients for bibingka. Photo by the author. 

 
Figure 4. Browned butter. Photo by the author. 

 

Like all oven pancakes or batter puddings or whatever you want to call this genre of baked 

object, bibingka deflate quickly after being removed from the oven. The brunch restaurant 

made a point of rushing Dutch babies out to the table while piping hot, so the diner might 

get to see it in its most impressive form. Just so, I always beckon my children to the oven to 

see our bibingka emerge. We pause The Last Unicorn or The Muppet Movie and gather to 

genuflect to the mysteries of eggs and chemistry and heat. The first pieces, we eat as soon 



     Digest: A Journal of Foodways and Culture 9:2 (2022) 

 

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as they’re cool enough to lift from the pan. The last ones we’ll have for dessert that evening, 

or sometimes a leftover wedge or two will make their way into Monday’s lunch boxes.  

 

 
Figure 5. In the oven, before baking. Photo by the author. 

 

 
Figure 6. After baking. Photo by the author.  

 

I wonder sometimes what the teachers at my toddler’s school make of the name she gives 

this item, if she ever has cause to say it. Would they dismiss the unusual word, evocative 

more of games like plinko and tiddlywinks than something as prosaic as a pancake, as just 

so much toddler pidgin, or might anyone at the school by chance recognize the name and 

know to associate it with a baked sweet from the Philippines? If either of my children 

retain sufficient delight at the way bibingka poof up in the oven and wish to share them 

with future sleepover guests or sweethearts, will anyone ask about or merely infer a false 

ethnic heritage, perhaps bolstered by the ambiguously ethnic features I inherited from my 



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third-generation Japanese-American mother? Or does the cosmopolitan array of children 

who attend her bilingual preschool in this university town and the multifarious 

backgrounds of their potential future breakfast partners render such things moot, 

everyone’s food and features and family compositions so unpredictable a hodgepodge that 

they flummox any attempt to ascertain origins and identities by culinary cues?  

 

 
Figure 7: Sliced bibingka . Photo by the author. 

 

I wonder, too, what the emotional tenor of the memories the aroma of bibingka may 

conjure up for them will be. For me, it is indelibly associated with the two of them and the 

mornings we’ve spent together, just the three of us, especially since I moved out of the only 

home any of us had known since their births. The smell of the butter browning as the oven 

preheats and I jab a whisk at any stubborn clumps of brown sugar still refusing to dissolve 

into the batter is the bridge between the early days of pandemic, when a fracturing 

marriage with two young children got compressed into the space between four cinderblock 

walls, and the refuge I eventually sought in rented rooms painted white, with coin laundry 

in the basement. In the face of realizing that nothing is ever going to turn out how you 

hoped or planned, it’s something more than mere comfort how reliable it is that if you crack 

six eggs into a bowl and whisk in ¾ cup each of coconut milk, brown sugar, and rice flour, 

add a glug of vanilla and generous pinch of salt, and bake it for 50 minutes at 320F in a well 

buttered pie pan, you will get something delicious that you and your children love to eat 

any time of day.  

 



     Digest: A Journal of Foodways and Culture 9:2 (2022) 

 

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Figure 8. Eating bibingka. Photo by the author.  

 

Perhaps for them, the mere word bibingka will someday evoke crisis and trauma. Far from 

being a sweet reminder of peaceful mornings with me, maybe it will automatically recall 

the conflict and sadness and fissure between their parents that defined the years when the 

Filipino sweet became a part of our regular weekend baking repertoire. Probably it is 

easier to worry about their future relationship with bibingka than it is to admit that these 

are obviously just worries about their future relationship with me, their understanding of 

their childhood and how it shaped them. How will they come to see these years of 

pandemic and whatever comes after, if there is an “after” to pandemic? How will they see 

my decision to divorce their father? What meaning will they attribute to its funny name and 

Filipino origin, whose lack of connection to their personal heritage is its own form of 

personal heritage? I beckon them to the oven. We inhale the aroma of browning butter, 

vanilla, and coconut. Someday that smell may be a kind of time machine, and I can only 

hope this kitchen remains a place that they might want to visit.  

 



 Finn, Baked In    Digest: A Journal of Foodways and Culture 9:2 (2022) 
 

 

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Figure 9: Author’s children eating bibingka. 

 

 


