Sarap & Palayok Bundle

This bundle package does not contain the limited-edition slipcase.

"Join the voyage: we want readers who cook, who like to eat, who enjoy reading about cooking and eating, who are curious about the subtext beneath our food."
—Doreen G. Fernandez & Edilberto N. Alegre

Celebrate the return of two of the greatest voices in Filipino food culture and history: Doreen G. Fernandez and Edilberto N. Alegre. This twin bundle featuring the new edition of Palayok and Sarap serves groundbreaking work on Filipino food culture to a new generation.

SARAP
Sarap: Essays on Philippine Food by Doreen G. Fernandez and Edilberto N. Alegre fortified one of the most formidable collaborations in Philippine literature when it was first published in 1988. The landmark anthology of essays is reintroduced to a new generation of readers in an illustrated edition with a previously unpublished foreword from Clinton Palanca.

PALAYOK
Hailed as “effortlessly elegant” when it was first published in 2000, Palayok: Philippine Food through Time, on Site, in the Pot by Doreen G. Fernandez presents the origins and evolution of Philippine cuisine to the then-present. From her background of cultural research, Fernandez serves not just the meal but also its surrounding context, antecedents, and influences.

DOREEN G. FERNANDEZ & EDILBERTO N. ALEGRE
A scholar of Philippine culture, literature, drama and theater, and cuisine, Doreen G. Fernandez (1934-2002) was born in Manila, but grew up in her native Silay in Negros Occidental, which shaped her rural and regional sensibilities. She earned a BA in English and History at St. Scholastica’s College in 1954 and an MA and PhD in Literature at the Ateneo de Manila University, with the poet Bienvenido Lumbera as her advisor. She married the interior architect Wili Fernandez, and it was when she and Wili were invited to co-write a newspaper column in 1968 on food that Doreen Fernandez’s thirty-four-year career as a food writer began.

Edilberto N. Alegre (1938-2009) was born four years after Fernandez and died seven years after she did. He was born in Naujan, Mindoro, but was raised in Victoria, Tarlac. He earned a BS in General Science and a BA and MA in English from the University of the Philippines and a PhD in Japanese Language and Literature from Kyoto University. He developed a theory of indigenization based on his linguistic study of Filipino, and formulated a decolonial approach to culture long before the emergence of our current decolonial movement, which continues to reform academia today.

Fernandez and Alegre first collaborated not on a food book, but on a two-volume oral history of Philippine writers in English, The Writer and His Milieu: An Oral History of First Generation Writers in English (1984) and Writers and Their Milieu: An Oral History of Second Generations Writers in English (1987). They went on to co-author Sarap, (1988), continued their collaboration with the Lasa series of dining guides (1989–1992) and Kinilaw: A Philippine Cuisine of Freshness (1991).

These books speak volumes about their shared passion for cultural research, astute scholarship, and, above all, everlasting friendship.