Favorite Argentine Dishes

Over the past few decades, I have traveled across many countries, partly for work, partly for pleasure. I have met people from Latin America and Europe, and also from the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Each roused my curiosity but at a certain moment, my point of view changed and I noticed, astonished, that they were also curious about me. Wondering about this interest, I thought that one possible reason for this was that the geographic location of my country makes it a remote place and, therefore, unknown. The kind of questions that I received made it clear that there was a great lack of knowledge about Argentina. “What language do you speak?” “What is its ethnic composition? Are people black, white, indigenous?” “What do you produce?” “What do you eat?”

Based on those experiences and on my personal exchanges at universities and public lectures, I decided to start introducing myself with a rather funny statement, widely known in Argentina: “We all know that Nordics descend from the Vikings; Spaniards from Goths and Visigoths; Irishmen from Celts; Peruvians from Incas; Mexicans from Aztecs, Mayans and Toltecs. But Argentineans descend from ships.” Those ships were packed with immigrants — many escaping war or famine — from different countries, divided families, and young people looking for a better future. They spent several months crossing the ocean and creating new bonds; in the meantime, they tried to learn some Spanish. After disembarking at the Buenos Aires port, where no one was waiting for them, they lived in tenement houses known as conventillos, underprivileged communities where they established a new family, and even invented a new way of speaking Spanish. South American Spanish has different expressions and idioms when compared to Iberian Spanish; the former presents greater phonetic variations due to different pronunciations of several consonants and to intonations resulting from the influence of other languages. In Argentina, for example, Pronunciation is undoubtedly weaker due to the influence of Italian.