The more than 1,000 recipes in El Libro de Doña Petrona are written in simple, direct prose. Each consists of a blunt series of instructions, diving right in with the first step of the preparation. “Boil a nice chicken.” “Make a dough with 350 grams of flour.” “Cook a kilo of peeled potatoes.” There are no appetizing descriptions, no colourful anecdotes, no serving suggestions, no health recommendations, calorie counts or any other embellishments. Occasionally Petrona adds a note about common problems, emphasizes a particularly tricky step, or reminds the cook about the oven temperature.
There are recipes for everything an ambitious housewife might want to make, from fancy hors d’oeuvres and pastries to everyday soups and stews. Many entries are variations on a theme, like the seven recipes for empanadas that all contain beef, onion, tomato, olives, raisins and hard-boiled egg, with marginally different preparations. Empanadas from Cordoba have diced potatoes, Porteños – from Buenos Aires – skip the tomato and add a bit of hot pepper, and those from her home town of Santiago del Estero have no olives and are filled in layers: first meat spiced with chili, cumin and a dash of vinegar, then sautéed onion with paprika, and finally sliced hard-boiled egg. They are all the ancestors of the ones my husband learned from his mother which are now common all over Argentina. They contain beef cooked with onions, tomato and cumin, combined with chopped olives, raisins and hard-boiled egg. They are never spicy, must not contain garlic, and have to be stuffed as full as possible without actually bursting. Along with asado, Argentinian barbeque, empanadas are my husband’s domain, and you can see him skillfully folding them closed with a special pleat, or repulgue, in the accompanying photos.
Other dishes from Doña Petrona’s compendium contain multiple embedded steps – recipes within recipes – requiring the cook to produce pasta, pastry, sauces, fillings and garnishes that are combined to produce the finished creation. The way that food is decorated and presented is extremely important, with colourful drawings illustrating the intended effect. To modern eyes, the presentations seem outlandish or downright bizarre: a molded salad meant to resemble an open fan, a cake in the form of a baby carriage, or a salmon pate shaped and covered with piped mayonnaise to resemble an ear of corn.
Two particular recipes exemplify this extravagance and are marked ricissima, or delicious, in my mother-in-law’s curving hand. One is for a roast turkey with three kinds of stuffing: meat, apple and prune. This glorious bird made an appearance at Thanksgiving for many years and was always greeted with great applause.
The other is El Grand Sandwich a la Nieve, a triple-decker sandwich in the form of a layer cake covered in a snowy icing of chaud-froid sauce. The recipe starts with instructions for a yeast bread enriched with eggs. While that is baking, you prepare mayonnaise (See p. 144) with the yolks of four eggs – no specifications for the amount of oil. Next, take the bread out of the oven and while it is cooling, make two fillings: the first with diced ham, the second with tuna. Mix both fillings with some of the mayonnaise, lemon, mustard and chopped lettuce. Now, make the chaud-froid sauce – a thick béchamel that is chilled and set with gelatin (See p. 143). Once the bread is cool, slice it carefully into three rounds. Spread the first round with the ham, top the second with tuna, put the third one on top and cover the whole thing with chaud-froid. Decorate the top with strips of roasted red peppers, sliced black truffles and green olives. Chill overnight in the refrigerator. The next day, make little pastry tart cases (See p. 98), fill them with some of the ham and tuna, and cover them with more sauce. Finally, make an aspic (cold meat jelly) and chop into squares (See p. 64). Place the sandwich on a large platter, surrounded by these garnishes and bring it to the table. If you can still stand up, you will bask in the astonishment of your family, and most importantly, your in-laws.
My husband and I decided to attempted this extravaganza on a long rainy Sunday afternoon with nothing much else to do. He is the mayonnaise specialist, I made the bread, and while working we both remembered a favorite family legend.
The ill-considered gift
When my husband was a boy, he and his family were heading home from a holiday visit to Argentina. There they all were at the airport, sorrowful and excited, surrounded by baggage, and being pelted with effusive hugs and kisses by a swarm of relatives who had come to say goodbye. Into this disorderly scene wafted one of the aunts – a sweetly exasperating woman with a radiant smile and the common sense of a day-old kitten. She was carrying an awkward parcel, swaddled in newspaper and tied up with string. “What’s in it, Tia?” my husband asked. “Mayonnaise, carito! My homemade mayonnaise. The one you liked so much.” His mother’s eyes widened, then narrowed. His younger sister giggled and cavorted, looking from her mother to her aunt, eagerly anticipating a scene. Sensing the need for immediate action, his father calmly took the package as his sister-in-law continued to prattle and his wife continued to glare. “Papy, what are you going to do with it?” My husband could see his mother’s displeasure radiating from her tightly pinched lips. His father made for their pile of suitcases and began methodically opening them one by one, ostentatiously peering inside, rearranging items, considering carefully and sighing deeply.
The final resting place of the ill-considered gift has remained murky. It never arrived in North America. Perhaps it slid under a row of empty chairs or squeezed into an inconspicuous spot between a trash bin and a fire extinguisher. Those who found it never came forward, and what they made of it is hard to guess. But, of course, they were Argentinian, and had probably received equally improbable presents from equally exuberant family members. So likely they knew the truth.
The story was over and the mayonnaise was ready. I gingerly sliced the bread, while my husband made the fillings. Flagging in our zest for authenticity, we decided to skip the chaud-froid sauce, a concoction not in general use since the end of the Second World War. The only current recipe I could find is from Martha Steward who uses it to cover a cold cooked ham. In an inadvertent tribute to Doña P, she trims it with strips of leek and carrots cut in the shape of stars, like an oversized vegetal argyle sock. Contemptibly, I ran up the white flag in the face of aspic and tartlet cases, but my husband came to the fore with showcase quality decorations of red and yellow peppers, olives and cherry tomatoes.
When we finally sat down to this tour-de-force we were wearily skeptical about the likely outcome, the way you feel about Christmas cookies after spending a couple of hours covered in icing and coloured sprinkles. Happily, it was delicious. The bread was yeasty-buttery-eggy and slightly sweet which went surprisingly well with the savory ham and tuna, and the tangy, unctuous mayonnaise. It is easy to laugh at the extravagance and turn up your nose at the pretention. But our Grand Sandwich was festive and flavorful and felt like a celebration. As we ate it for lunch the next day, at home, working dutifully at our computers, I felt a wave of gratitude to Doña Petrona for bringing us fun and foolishness and the spark of memory. I think she would have enjoyed our success, forgiven our omissions, and been happy for our contentment.