The history of Good Shepherd’s iconic ube jam comes in a series of pieces that fit together in the end.
It begins with Irish missionaries who had finished a mission in Burma. The first Good Shepherd sisters in the country arrived in 1912 and settled in Batangas where they eventually established the St. Bridget’s School. Baguio became the summer respite for these hardworking sisters. Initially, they sought hospitality from the Belgian Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, but as their community grew, they realized the need for their own space. In 1948, they found a crumbling, war-battered house that they purchased in the name of their renamed St. Bridget’s College. This became the Good Shepherd convent that we know today.
The first Filipino member of the Religious of the Good Shepherd was former math teacher Sister Mary Assumption Ocampo who joined in 1935 in France. She served as a principal of St. Bridget’s for 25 years where she developed a reputation for innovation as well as challenging her nuns to pursue education. She would be reassigned later on to Venezuela where she served as a prison administrator. She was there for 10 years.
And then there was Sister Fidelis Atienza, a Batangas native who later moved to the convent’s Baguio base.
She entered the Novitiate of the Good Shepherd in 1951. Around that same time—1952 to be exact—children began to live in the convent grounds. Bishop William Brasseur asked the congregation to open an apostolate for Cordilleran youth, which resulted in the establishment of a boarding school for Igorot girls. Struggling to maintain the convent as well as the 200 children in their care, the nuns begged for leftovers from the market. However, their desire to come up with a more practical and regular way of sustaining their growing number led them to business. Seeing the abundance of Baguio’s famous strawberries, they began making jam. Thus, the Mountain Maid Training Center (MMTC) was born.
Sister Atienza was prolific in the kitchen. In the 1960s, she opened the Marian Bakery where she made “crispies” using host wafer trimmings. This would serve as the prototype for MMTC’s angel cookies.
By the time she was stationed in Baguio in the 1970s, the nuns needed to depend on a less-seasonal ingredient for their flagship product. In 1976, a friend told Sister Atienza to come up with her version of Tantamco’s, which, according to Yummy.ph, was the original maker of ube halaya in Baguio. Armed with pots and firewood, the enterprising sister began to experiment with the first versions of MMTC’s ube jam.
Sister Ocampo, who had returned to the Philippines in 1975 and was assigned to Baguio, sought to perfect Sister Atienza’s recipe. She would constantly ask her fellow nuns for comments and suggestions before coming up with the final version of that creamy, sweet ube jam that Filipinos know well and love.
In 2004, after years of resounding success, the resourceful Sister Ocampo employed the use of machines, excusing the tireless student-workers in the convent from hours of manually stirring jam. By automating the process and rigidly sticking to the tried-and-tested recipe, MMTC was able to bolster their production while staying true to the quality for which they have become known. The Good Shepherd ube jam became something of an icon.
In 2019, MMTC shocked the country when they released white-colored ube jam. The unexpected change followed weeks without stocks. According to Good Shepherd’s Facebook page, climate change had affected the purple yam harvest and they had been struggling to find a stable ube supplier for years. When El Niño dried up the purple yam plants, the wilder white version managed to survive. Despite its lack of color, it tasted the same. The supply issue, however, caused it to fetch for a higher price, costing P230 compared to the purple’s P210.
That change was only temporary. In fact, it was not the first time that Good Shepherd had to resort to using white due to a scarcity. However, that short month in 2019 was the first time there was a complete dearth of the purple variety.
That setback is just one of the examples of how the sisters have managed to roll through the punches. So many ingredients contributed to Good Shepherd’s ube jam—from the nuns’ need for a permanent vacation house and their mission of caring for children to their own scrappiness to survive and one nun’s proclivity for cooking and another’s propensity for quality.
