Rachel Laudan

Sitting in front of me I have El Arte de la Mesa by Lola P. de Pietrana, a hefty volume of a thousand pages. And it presents a little culinary mystery that I’d love help in solving.

Here’s the background. One of my minor hobbies is compiling a list of “kitchen bibles,” the great comprehensive cookbooks of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Think Mrs Beeton for England or The Joy of Cooking (though there are many others) for the US.

Every country that was thought itself to be modern had one or more of these. They were usually written by women, usually had hundreds or thousands or recipes, usually introduced their readers to international as well as national cooking.

I love them because they register a country on the brink: on the brink between being a colony and a nation, on the brink between the dominance of the cuisine of the aristocrats and the cuisine of the upper middle class, on the brink between regional cuisines and national cuisines, on the brink between traditional kitchens and kitchens with iron ranges, or electric or gas stoves, piped water, electric light.

Now Argentina is not a country over-blessed with cookbooks, and more of that in another post. This time, though, I bought a reprint of Doña Lola. It’s published by Emecé and I’d unite with librarians, bibliographers, and just plain old culinary detectives in scolding them for their lack of information. What we learn is that this is the fourth edition, published in a massive run of a whole 2000 copies, of a book that they acquired in 1974.

I think, though, it has to be older. It drips of the prosperous Argentina, the all-but-British colony of the early twentieth century. The introduction to the first edition, by Doctor Antonio Luis Beruti, is also undated but the style, with its references to the Roman cookbook that goes by the name of Apicius, also harks to the same period. At a guess I’d date it between 1900 and 1930.

These kitchen bibles, introducing the prosperous upper class to international cooking while promoting the nation, are a window into the anxieties and aspirations of a newly prosperous late nineteenth-century world. Doña Lola’s book is as stately, as ostentatious, as cosmopolitan in its recipes as the houses of the wealthy late nineteenth-century suburbs of Recoleta and Palermo are in their architecture.

So the immediate questions are: When was this book first published? And who was Doña Lola? I’ve done the obvious searches on the web and in libraries, but cookbooks are ephemera and especially if they are published in far off Argentina.

And, a teaser, here we find a recipe for “salsa rosa.” Sandwiched between the hollandaise and the bearnaise, it’s white sauce or béchamel with a couple of tablespoons of ketchup per cup of sauce. You can buy pre-prepared salsa rosa by Knorr in any corner store in Buenos Aires today.  It’s offered as one of the possible sauces for your pasta in every middle level restaurant, along with filete and bolognese. It’s just a whizz for livening up your pasta.

Ideas anyone?