Perhaps one of Cebu’s best known little secrets is Faustino ‘Tinong’ Alfon who cooked Jose Rizal’s favorite dishes while the country’s national hero was on exile in Dapitan.
Known to all even in his childhood as Bolhog, the Cebuano-Visayan term for a person who is blind in one eye, Tinong probably sought Rizal out to find some healing for his incurable deformity but ended up in his company in Dapitan instead. Or perhaps it was his anti-Spanish sentiments as a young Sanicolasnon in the early 1890s while he was barely in his 20s.
In 1934, already well into his 60’s, Tinong Bolhog was interviewed by an unnamed writer for a Christmas article in Bag-ong Kusog, one of the three newspapers published by the late Sen. Vicente Rama, the grandfather of our current mayor, Michael Rama.
Unfortunately, not much is detailed about Tinong except that he was born in San Nicolas and joined Rizal in Dapitan. There he lived even after Rizal’s exile ended in December 1896. Tinong later married twice and, as fate would have it, was also widowed twice. By the time of the interview, Tinong was living in poverty.
Rizal’s inclinations
We learn a lot from Tinong about Rizal’s gustatory inclinations, which he described as simple but with the trappings of elegance. Rizal would have at most three kinds of food in every meal. He loved fish prepared in one of four ways that we still do today: as “tinuwa nga linamasan”, (the Tagalog “sinigang”); as “inun-unan” (the Tagalog and Chinese sounding “paksiw”); “minantikaang isda” (fried fish) and “sinugba” (char-broiled fish).
Rizal also loved “unod sa baka kon manok ginisal” in the Spanish way of stir fried beef or chicken, according to Tinong, although in general he rarely indulged in red meat.
Among the fruits Rizal loved counted the lanzones (“buwahan”), mangoes, atis (sweetsop) and sikapote (chicos zapote).
Despite the difficult life in exile, Rizal ate with elegance. His meals had the trappings of European fine dining, from the “cubiertos” (flatware) down to table napkins and a sip of wine or two. Interesting is the way Tinong compares Rizal’s dining behavior against the vividness and noise of the eating habits of animals that one can still find today, thus: “Wala igkita kaniya ang tawong bastos ug walay pamatasan nga mosuyop sa sabaw sama sa babuy, magsagasa ang baba sa inusap sama sa kabaw, ug magkabulingit ang simud sama sa iro (One cannot find in him an uncouth person who slurps on soup like that of a pig, who chomps noisily like a carabao, and whose face is full of morsels like that of a dog’s snout).” Instead, Rizal ate slowly and quietly.
Rizal’s fine dining habits apparently extended to the way he treated Tinong and all his other servants. Among the things Tinong never forgot about the hero was that he gave them a salary of two pesos each every month even though they did not want to be paid as they were there voluntarily. Moreover, Rizal never scolded any of them and not a cuss word was ever heard from the hero in all the time Tinong was with him in Dapitan. And during their free time, Rizal would teach the Spanish language and some basic medical skills to Tinong and the servants.
It is to Rizal’s credit that, despite prevailing superstition and practice of the time (and even until now, perhaps?) never to hire a person with a walled eye as it is a sign of bad fate, he trusted his meals with Tinong Bolhog.
It would have been fitting had a photo of Tinong been added in the article. Instead, an illustration of him is all that we have. Worse, why the then-municipality of Cebu never accorded him any honor remains unexplained. After all, then as now, Dapitan was a short boat ride away. /Jobers Reynes Bersales