The last time I saw Margarita Forés was in mid-October. It was the first of a planned series of meetings to work on something she’d never done before—a book in her own words, an official account of a life spent pursuing creativity in multiple directions, but mostly in food. She had been thinking about her legacy lately and the book was one of many things that would help define it. To me, Margarita seemed to be one of those rare comets whose purpose perfectly aligned with her passions. Here was a public figure, a globetrotting and pioneering Filipina who had been written about perhaps hundreds of times, in the Philippines and abroad, and whose origin story includes all the ingredients for a compelling if not glamorous read: for starters, a famously privileged childhood, followed by exile in 1970s New York, a coming of age in Italy and decades of shaping..
