Coconut Milk Chicken Adobo

Adobo is probably the Filipino dish best known and least understood by Westerners. Like the name of the Philippines itself—imposed by Spanish colonialists in the sixteenth century in honor of their king, Philip II—it bears the lexical imprint of a foreign empire. In 1613, a Franciscan friar, attempting to compile a Tagalog dictionary, reached for the Spanish verb adobar to describe the dousing of ingredients with vinegar, to season and pickle. But that technique of preservation, essential i