BICENTENARY FOOD (By Hostel Buenos Aires)

Argentine food is an elusive concept. Our food doesn’t have a clear profile as thousand-year-old foods of India, Mexico, China or Peru. To those foreign observers, barbecue is our main dish due to the known quality of our cow meat. Inside our country, specialists argue about the influence of Mediterranean food (the Spanish and Italian immigration and its consequences) and the difficulty to define the “real” Argentine dishes. Maybe a good start could be rescuing those dishes that are prepared since the very beginning of our nation: the bicentenary dishes.

Next may 25th, when Argentina reaches 200 years of independent life, many people will be celebrating at home, in bars or restaurants facing –without knowing- historical dishes. The greater example is the “Carbonada” (rice, cow meat and pumpkin, sometimes including potatoes and seasoned with chopped tomato and sweet paprika) or the different preparations of corn (flavored corn paste wrapped in corn leaves, stewed corn). Undoubtedly, corn was the star ingredient of Argentine food in 1810.

Opposite to the popular belief, cow meat barbecue won’t become popular until the middle of the XIX Century, when the gauchos (typical Argentine country figures) expanded it. In the beginnings of the XX Century, the migratory influence consolidated other nowadays classical dishes as pizza, empanadas, pasta and other. But, back in the Bicentenary classics, we can’t forget about desert.

Corn was to main courses what milk was to deserts. Among these, you’ll find rice pudding, custards, sweet potato pudding and “Semita” (cornmeal tortilla). Another important desert was roasted milk, precedent of the Argentine favorite dessert, “Dulce de leche”.