When their safe houses in Manila were no longer safe, the rebels took shelter at the airy bungalow of Doreen Gamboa Fernandez, a sugar planter’s daughter turned literature professor and food writer.

It was the 1980s, and the Philippines was still in the grip of the strongman Ferdinand Marcos. In a later interview, Ms. Fernandez recalled how her university colleagues had chided her for writing restaurant reviews in such precarious times: “How can you sit there and do the burgis” — Tagalog for bourgeois — “things you do?”

But the leaders of the National Democratic Front knew Ms. Fernandez as an ally. She dressed their bullet wounds and fed them elaborate meals in a dining room hung with art by the Cubist painter Vicente Manansala and the Neorealist Cesar Legaspi.

Then, while her guests recuperated by the pool in the cool shadow of a great acacia, she retreated to her desk and resumed the task of documenting the indigenous cooking traditions — scorned and ignored during centuries of colonialism — of an archipelago spanning more than 7,000 islands and nearly 200 languages.