From the book’s introduction: This is a fun book disguised as a cookbook. It is a brief autobiography with a rather extended digression on food.

In a few pages, Mr. Honesto C. General — Ning to his Bicolano friends — writes retrospectively about a three-year segment of his life as a teenager during the war, suddenly without the househelp that he and his family had been accustomed to. Four pages deceptively entitled “Preface” encapsulate his origins, his upbringing and, in a few splashes of color, set him in the world many of us lived in — Bicol.