A scholar of Philippine culture, literature, performance, and food history, 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 at St. Scholastica’s College after World War II 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 decorator/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 historian began.
Edilberto N. Alegre, 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), but 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.
