I´m an Argentine architect, living in California. I´ve just opened a blog to leave our recipes to my daughters. Regarding your article about Spaghetti and meatballs, we prefer the meatballs fried and served as an appetizer.

Spaghetti comes with marinara sauce (tuco) or bolognesa sauce (marinara plus grind meat).
The bread crumbs in the meatballs would spoil the pasta and sauce, if you understand what I mean, if we want meatballs in sauce, we make a different recipe, without bread crumbs. It´s completely different the way Americans eat them. And we´d never put them in a sandwich.
Lasagna, after boiled, we fill it and put it in the oven, with sauce.
Almost everybody in Buenos Aires had an Italian  or Spanish ancestor. We learnt a lot from them, and it is a shame for a woman not to know how to cook. We really appreciate good food, Spanish, Italian, then French cuisine. Served at a nice table, the finest, the better.

Here´s the post that prompted all this,  an Argentinian recipe for lasagne in response to a reader’s request.

For Adam.  When I read this recipe I wonder: Is it actually baked?  The nearest thing to a reference to an oven is the instruction to serve it hot.  But that could have been achieved by the assembly of the sheets of pasta and the sauce.  My impression based on two stints in two different apartments in Argentina is that ovens are not important elements in kitchens and would probably have been less important 60 years ago.  And if this is so, I wonder how many of these assembled pasta dishes were just ways of presenting the dish?

For Nick.  I’m not sure that we can asimilate these meat balls with the US pasta and meatballs.  Albondigas are a time-honored tradition in the Spanish world, so it would not have been a big jump for Italo-Argentinians to combine them with pasta.

More important, I’d like to invite you to reconsider the assumption underlying your response.  This is, I take it, that the Italian food of Italy is the ‘true’ Italian food and that of Italians in other parts of the world is a pale and often inaccurate imitation.  The point of my post was that as Italian food in Italy was being formed a huge proportion of the population was overseas. Moreover there was constant to and fro between Italy, Buenos Aires, New York, Toronto, San Francisco.  What about thinking of these overseas communities as just more regions of Italy?

I could go on.

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I’m going to post comment here as well as in the comments area.  Have lots to say about this but later when I’ve done my work for the day.  So wait for edits.

This from Australia from Adam Balic of the Art and Mystery of Food.

Lasagne/Lasagna refers to the pasta, as well as the dish, so there are many variations. Even in modern Italy there is a huge amount of variation, I had never seen ricotta in a Lasagne until I went to the USA, where it seems quite common, maybe reflecting southern Italian roots.

Baked pasta dishes under various names (“pasta al forno”, “passtico”, “vincisgrassi” et al.) are vary common too, and not limited to Italy at all. However, there is a recipe that is similar to yours in the cookbook written by Ippolito Cavalcanti (duca di Buonvicino) in 1839 in Naples.

And this from Belguium, from Nick Trachet.

ah, the famous pasta and meat balls, an all American cliché. During my many travels in Italy (especially Rome, I used at a time to work for FAO), I have NEVER encountered meat balls with pasta. The kitchen of Italy remains very much ‘contadino’: peasant, and earth bound.
Lasagne is typical Bologna-kitchen; the North: pasta with egg, no garlic, no olive oil, vey little spices (nutmeg) and tomato but plenty butter (Bologna is nicknamed “la grassa”) “ragu” (meat sauce) and grana cheese.

italian recipes are usually much more specific on the quality of flour -sometimes mixtures of different grades expressed in a number of zero’s- idem for different cheeses. But egg dough, “flat” pasta (opposed to ‘tubular’ and meat sauce is certainly Northern Italian

And it was a time when the cuisine was in great flux.  New dried pasta. New canned tomatoes. Political upheavals in Italy. No reason to assume the cuisine followed the rules that we read today in Italian cookbooks.

So when I had a request from a reader in San Francisco who wanted to make lasagne like his mother made it using the early 20th century Argentinian cookbook, Doña Lola’s El Arte de la Mesa, it seemed a good moment to revisit the Italian cuisine of Buenos Aires briefly.

It’s not the first time I’ve talked about Italian cuisine in Argentina, nor about the varieties of pasta and pizza in Buenos Aires.  Doña Lola’s El arte de la mesa has a murky publishing history but one of my commentators told me the 6th edition was published in 1955, so the first was probably no later than the early 1940s.

There’s only one recipe for lasagne in this thousand-page book.  It occurs in the relatively short section on Pastas and Arroz, about 20 pages.   Rice gets 20 recipes, canelones 5, fideos (a broad category, roughly spaghetti) 5, macarrones 5, noquis (still a favorite in Argentina) 10, polenta 5, raviolis 10, tallarines (broader noodles) 9, and a miscellany of others.

So here’s the recipe for “lasagnas”.  In the original quantities are on the left, instructions on the right.  This is for 6 portions and the preparation and cooking time are listed as 45 minutes. Doña Lola moved fast than I do.

1/2 kilo flour

2 eggs

1/2 cup of salmuero (brine)

tuco (tomato sauce) to cook the albondigas (meat balls)

200 g of chopped meat

1 slice of bread

4 spoons of milk

1 egg

1 yolk

1/2 cup flour

1 cup grated cheese

First you make the dough with flour, eggs, and brine and you let it rest, ending up like a dough for raviolis.

On the side you prepare the sauce and in this sauce you cook some very tiny albondigas which you make with meat, salt, bread soaked in milk and well broken up and squeezed out, egg and yolk.  You make them the size of a nuez (probably walnut here) rolling them in flour and you put them to cook in the sauce over a slow fire.

You estirar (stretch, roll) the dough out finely, you cut redondeles (big rounds) or squares and you cook them in boiling water and salt. Once they are cooked you drain them carefully so as not to break them, you pass them through cold water, and you dry them on a linen, and you place them in a fuente) dish in camadas (layers) filling them like alfajor (roughly pastries with sweet fillings) with the suace in the middle and dusting them with cheese.  You continue until you finish, you should serve it really hot.

I’ve no idea if this is anything like my reader’s mother’s lasagne.   But the result must be layers of pasta with small meat balls, tomato sauce, and some cheese, we know not what.  I assume the pasta was cut to fit the shape of the dish.  It is less cheesy or creamy than we are used to.  And the fact that the author compares it to alfajores suggests that it was not that common at the time.

And many of the other recipes for pasta in the book are in fact what Americans might call casseroles: layered dishes of pasta, meat and sauce of some kind.  Was this common in Italy at the time?  In the US?  Comments?

Well, yesterday after a protracted debate the Argentine Senate refused to sign the agricultural export tax into law.

This is great news for Argentina which was on the verge of destroying its most productive industry. And it’s great news for the rest of the world because this major source of basic grains and soy won’t dry up. Soy futures fell immediately.

Here’s a Wall Street Journal report on the Argentine farmers’ struggle. And here’s an account of the reaction of the market to the news of the Argentine farmer’s victory.

More varied: Perhaps it’s just that the names are different, perhaps it’s because dried pasta is less common and gnocchi-style and filled pastas are much more common.

Chubbier. Argentinians relish a wide variety of ñoquis (gnocchi), including the delicious malfatti (spinach gnocci).

Filled. Restaurants offer ravioli with a wide variety of fillings as well as other filled pasta such as sorrentinos, panzottis, and agnolotis.

Less shiny and softer. Part of this is that dried pastas are offered much less often than in the States (I can’t speak for Italy). No neighborhood is without a fresh pasta store selling all kinds of pasta, ñoqui, and ravioli with a wide variety of stuffings (as well as crepes and kreplach, there’s no need to be provincial about this). Part of it, I think, is that Argentinians are much less concerned that their pasta be al dente and much more concerned that it be suave and creamy.

The sauces tend to be much less red, much creamier. Yes a wide range of tomato sauces are available, their names varying with their ingredients, including pomarola, scarpedo, filetto, napolitano and putanesca. And there’s bolonesa, and carbonara, and cuatro quesos. But there is also crema (bechamel), rosa (bechamel with a little tomato ketchup added), verde (bechamel with spinach added), scrofa (fileto with cream, basil and cheese), and parisienne (bechamel with chopped sliced ham, chicken, and sliced or chopped mushrooms).

For an idea of sauces that are popular, visit this site for the Knorr sauces sauces for pasta that are available in Argentina. No snide jokes, here, please. If all of us interested in food knew half as much about the preferences in different parts of the world as Unilever does we’d be preaning ourselves. When I’m traveling I always make it a point to check out what Knorr seasonings and sauces are available on grocery store shelves.

As to pizza, it’s excellent. The toppings seemed to me to be pretty much what you’d get in the States though whether that’s the result of the recent globalization of pizza I have no way of knowing.

Pizza is often topped with a slice of faina (a flatbread made of chick pea flour that is common along the coastline of the Italian and French rivieras).

And because I’m not a great tomato fan (no really, not everyone loves tomatoes) I became addicted to fugazza (from the Italian focaccia) which is made of the same dough as the pizza but topped with onions or fugazzeta, topped with onions and cheese.

So, you will say to me, this all points to a northern origin for the Italians in Argentina.  And certainly many Argentines do come from northern Italy, Genoa or Liguria to be more precise.  I’m not sure this is the whole story though and I’ll explain why later.

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Just consider the following:

• Argentine cuisine is “Italian” cuisine if you leave aside empanadas (pasties) and parilla (grilled meats) and some regional cuisines.
• Pasta and pizza are the everyday dishes for everybody
• The cheeses of Argentina are overwhelmingly of Italian ancestry
• The charcuterie of Argentina is overwhelmingly of Italian ancestry
• The better breads, pastries, cakes and confections are overwhelmingly of Italian ancestry
• By the 1920s, the Sunday meal for the people of Buenos Aires had ceased to be the puchero (beef vegetable stew) of the Spanish and become a pasta meal. This was apparently true among families and in parts of the country without direct Italian influence. The asado (grilled meats) apparently did not appear until the 1950s.

None of this could be claimed for Italian food in the United States, however popular it now is.

All this raises lots of questions.  What is Argentine-Italian food?  How does it compare to Italian-Italian food, to New York Italian food (and to San Francisco, Toronto and Sao Paolo Italian food)?  Where did it come from? Why the differences?

This series is based on two months in Buenos Aires, one in 2003, one in 2008. I’ve also relied on Samuel L. Baily, Immigrants in the Lands of Promise: Italians in Buenos Aires and New York City, 1870-1914 (Cornell, 1999) and Los sabores de la patria: las intrigas de la historia argentina contadas desde la mesa y la cocina (Norma, 1998).

Two months scarcely qualifies anyone to be an expert on the cuisine of anywhere.  I’m jumping in because there is so little on the culinary history of Argentina.  But if you know more or can correct me, please jump in.

Thanks to Cristina Palacio for sending along the schedule (and for all the other bits and pieces she sends out on what’s going on in the study of Mexican cuisine).

First, the efforts to persuade the Chinese to adopt the American habit of eating cookies with a glass of milk links nicely to the huge growth of the Chinese dairy industry.

Second, the Chinese are part of the wafer cookie world. Wafer cookies, although known in the US for example, are relatively rare being a minority taste unless they’re used to enclose ice cream. The US is clearly the land of baked cookies that are crisp or cakey but not wafers.

But in lots of places, wafers are preferred. Here in Mexico, for example, the premier cookie maker, Mac’Ma, has a couple of dozen lines of wafers–square and filled, spherical and filled, different shapes, some coated (in the last twenty years they’ve merged with other companies to make chocolates and pasta too but the cookies go back further).

Now both kinds of cookies have European origins, I think. The wafer-type cookies are secularized communion wafers and are related to waffles and other such things. The cakey-biscuit (in the English sense–is there a technical name for this class?) cookies with their mixture of fat, flour, and sugar are very typical of European sweet baked goods.

So how do the geographic divisions between the two run? And why? This might seem a trivial question but such questions usually lead to big divisions between nations, empires, trade routes and the like. Of course Kraft and the other big cookie companies know. It’s just us poor mortals who have to inquire. Any thoughts about which countries like which kind? Or why?

P.S. And in Argentina oreos come filled with dulce de leche!

A week or so ago I posted on the protests in Buenos Aires. Farmers, enraged by a new export tax on grains that meant that they would be paying 40% on their exports blocked the roads to the ports and and Buenos Aires.

For several nights the urban middle class in a new alliance joined the farmers in protesting, resorting to the traditional cacerolazos (from cazuelas, pots), the banging of pots and pans. It sent prickles up the spine to hear the clanging of saucepans echoing up eight- to twenty-story high rises for hours and hours. My husband, returning by taxi from the north of the city, reported that the rhythmic beating accompanied him for the ten-mile trip.

The following week, President Cristina Kirchner responded with demonstrations in her support. She needed to because she’d only been in office three months (although she followed her husband) and her political survival was at stake. At the level of day to day life in Buenos Aires, it’s indicative that when we turned up at the National Art Museum it was closed because the employees had to attend the rally. Kirchner’s argument was that the farmers could export so much because the government keeps the peso low, that farmers enjoy cheap diesel, that the price of grains had risen and they could afford it, and that it was important that farmers grow food for the home market rather than soy for export.

After her demonstrations, and after she order a total halt to the export of beef, an industry that has been carefully managed for a long time, the farmers stopped the blockade, at least for the time being.

For another account of what it was like in Buenos Aires in March go to the blog by Saltshaker, aka chef and sommelier Dan Perlman. Check it out while you’re at it, as it’s the most interesting English-language site, perhaps the most interesting site period, on the contemporary food scene in Buenos Aires and has lots of non-food postings as well.

The Argentine press reported day to day events but had little context. In the US the Miami Herald seemed to do the best job but it was clear that this was not a story that was deemed likely to sell to Americans. In Europe, the British, probably because of their long-standing ties to Argentina, had the most coverage. As usual the Economist could be relied on for an informed report. So here’s my take.

Some background facts

In 2002, there was no export tax on grain in Argentina. In 2007 it was 22%. Cristina Kirchner’s proposal, produced overnight in the middle of the growing season, was to raise it to 40% (and the farmers pay income tax as well).

25% of Argentina’s budget comes from just this one tax. That is, much of the financial recovery from the meltdown of 2002, desperate times in Argentina, comes, as every taxi driver reminded us, from soy farmers.

Argentina’s production of soy has almost quadrupled in the last ten years.

The major users of soy are the US, China and the EU.

17% of Argentinian soy goes to China, 50% to the EU.

Argentina is the third largest producer of soy beans in the world.

Soy’s major use is as animal feed.

In short, Argentinean soy politics is crucial for Argentina, for the European Union, for China, and thus for the globe.

Framing the Issue

Several aspects of the protests struck me as interesting.

• Neither in the newspapers that I scanned, nor on television, nor among those Argentineans I talked to was much made of the environmental issues of the dramatic shift to soy growing in Argentina in the last decade, nor to the fact that this GM soy. I suspect in the United States this would have been given top billing.
• Nor was there criticism of agribusiness. Argentina’s major source of foreign income since the late nineteenth century has been large-scale export agriculture and no one has any doubt that agriculture is a business and should be run as such. La Nacion, the more stolid and upper middle class of the two major dailies, has a whole section devoted to El Campo (agriculture) on Saturdays, complete with statistics on the costs of irrigation, of electric fencing, as well as prices for livestock and crops, as well as ads for balers, drills, pesticides, fertilizers, and seeds. Not something you’d see in the NY Times or the Washington Post.
• One editorial from a farmer and administrative official in Inrieville in the province of Cordoba, angrily pointed out that his town received 4 million pesos (roughly three pesos to the US dollar) from the government and paid in export taxes in 2007, 100 million pesos, a figure that would double if the new tax went through. Clearly a major wealth transfer from country to city.
• It’s not just hard nosed agribusiness. In this same paper is a a column, Rincon Gaucho, that celebrates nostalgic memories of the gaucho and the country life. These rural virtues were much praised in the late nineteenth century by the right wing oligarchy that ran the country as an antidote to the immigrants, political unrest, and industrialization of the cities. These memories are still alive and well and played on by the government.
• Although there’s much talk of the oligarchy, in fact one of the country’s largest agribusinesses had its roots in the enterprise of an impoverished Jewish immigrant from Moldavia in the early twentieth century. Now the Los Grobo group is the leader in soy agriculture.
• Argentina is a member of the Cairns Group, a group of countries that between them produce 25% of the world’s export agriculture. They include Australia, Brazil, Canada, Thailand, the Philippines, South Africa, Indonesia, and New Zealand. They are committed to working to eliminate both tariffs and subsidies in agriculture. That’s why Argentina effectively does not have agricultural subsidies.

Unanswered Questions
The reporting leaves me with all kinds of questions. Here are some.

• How much soy meal do China and the EU have in hand? What would happen if there were a protracted break in supply?
• Why is the EU buying Argentina soy meal, given its hostility to GM crops?
• What are the global players saying/doing about the new food policies in Argentina? On the industry side, you have the big grain companies such as ADM, Bunge, Cargill, and Dreyfuss, on the finance side you have banks such as HSBC. On the political side you have the other members of the Cairns group who must see the imposition of an export tax as counter their entire agreement?

Bottom Line

I think the Kirchner strategy is a very dangerous one. Argentina can produce far more food than it needs to feed its people. It desperately needs foreign currency. It has one of the most efficient agricultural industries in the world. Farmers are doing well now, but they have had a number of lean years. Imposing this tax will produce revenue in the short run but do nothing to encourage farmers to continue to invest in export agriculture. Sudden veers in government policy make it possible for businessmen (farmers) to plan.

At another level, the Argentinean crisis should be interesting to anyone concerned about good food. First, because it threatens the global food system. Second, because it’s a useful lesson in how thinking about global food issues, it’s important not to take the US as typical. Same issues there, but different context.