To Mimi with all my love

Mamy
24-9-47

This is the inscription on the inside cover of my mother-in-law, Mimi’s copy of the classic Argentinian cookbook, El Libro de Doña Petrona.  Her mother gave it to her for her birthday the year before she was married, making her one of the thousands of brides to receive this idiosyncratic encyclopedia of recipes and advice.  The recipes range from everyday standbys to elaborate pastries designed to impress.  The advice covers menus, table settings, flowers and what color uniforms maids should wear. This was the guide for a new generation of women who aspired to become model middle class housewives, pouring themselves into their families and homes with cooking as an expression of their ambitions and desires. In Spanish, a housewife is the ama de casa, the lady of the house, and if anyone could be said to embody the soul of the ama de casa, it was Mimi. Her cooking was flavorful, elegant, varied.  Her house was immaculate and her table was always set before you arrived, the tablecloth and matching napkins carefully selected, glasses placed just so and the correct number of forks, knives and spoons ready for each dish of the multi-course meal. She made perfect renditions of standard fare:  crisp fried milanesas with buttery mashed potatoes, pasta with tomato sauce and plenty of cheese, puchero, a long-cooked stew with meat, sausage, squash and corn.  But she also made her own ravioli, fancy desserts, and for her daughter Lil who had strayed from the fold and become a vegetarian, moist lemony salmon with rice, beautiful salads and tender vegetables. 

That Mimi’s copy of Doña Petrona was well used can be seen from the dual inscriptions on its final page.  The publisher’s note indicates that this was one of 10,000 copies in the 21^st edition, printed at its premises on avenida Azopardo in Buenos Aires in August, 1946.  After a couple of decades, the book must have fallen apart because it was recovered in sturdy yellow wallpaper by the principle beneficiary of its use, Mimi’s husband Alfredo.  To commemorate his contribution to the family’s gastronomical well-being he made an addendum to the official inscription in his neat engineer’s handwriting, stating proudly that the book had been re-issued in January, 1970 a product of his workshop in Salem, Massachusetts.  

The food and style of living that Doña Petrona portrayed in her cookbook reflected the aspiration of many Argentinians of her generation to join the middle class.  In 1934, when the first volume was published, the country was one of the richest in South America.  Immigrants who had arrived from Europe at the turn of the century had prospered, and they dreamed of emulating the homes, food, cooking and manners of the upper classes.  These were people like Mimi’s father who had arrived alone from an arid hilltop village in Calabria, sent by his parents as a teenager because they feared he would be conscripted into the Italian army.  Taken in by paisanos already settled in the city, he eventually ran a scrap metal business and was able to build his own comfortable home which still stands today in the Flores neighborhood across the park from the church where Mimi and Alfredo were married.

The food and style of living that Doña Petrona portrayed in her cookbook reflected her desire and that of a generation of Argentinians, including Mimi, to join the middle class. My thinking about the parallels between the lives of these two women owes an enormous debt to the Rebekah Pite’s biography of Petrona, Creating a Common Table in Twentieth Century Argentina: Doña Petrona, Women, and Food.  This book is a fascinating read, both for its unique information about Petrona’s early life, and for its analysis of the social history of cooking and women’s changing roles in Argentinian society.  I’d encourage you to read it:  (https://uncpress.org/book/9781469606903/creating-a-common-table-in-twentieth-century-argentina/

or https://www.amazon.com/Creating-Common-Table-Twentieth-Century-Argentina/dp/1469606909).

As detailed in the first chapter of Pite’s book, Petrona’s father was also an immigrant, from the Basque country of Spain.  Her mother was the daughter of an Italian father and an indigenous Quechua woman, making her a true criolla.  Petrona was born in about 1895 (she was evasive or uncertain about the actual year) on a small rural estate, in the northern province of Santiago del Estero.  She was the sixth of seven children, and after her father died, her mother moved to the capital city where she ran a boarding house.  Petrona claimed that she never wanted to cook, frequently repeating the story of how she had cried and protested when forced to learn to make pastry.  The lesson she seems to have absorbed was that cooking is hard work and that she wanted nothing to do with it.  Unlike many girls in the provinces, she went to school, but left at the age of 15 when she ran away with the 20-year old son of a wealthy and aristocratic landowner to escape the marriage her mother had planned for her with an army officer who was one of the boarders. 

Petrona lived and worked with this prodigal son on his family’s estancia for five years.  It was a 15,000 hectare establishment with 5,000 head of cattle.  She sent a picture to her mother – presumably after the dust had settled – which could hardly have been reassuring to a maternal eye.  Wearing a short striped skirt, leather boots and a wide hat pushed back on her head, she leans with a confident swagger against a large cactus, a pistol at her waist and a rifle under her arm.  Her head is tilted back and she smiles provocatively at the camera with a look that says she is having the time of her life and daring anyone to even think of trying to come and take her back. (To see this wonderful picture, see p. 36 of Pite’s book.)

When her lover left for Europe, he hired a manager for the ranch, Oscar Gandulfo.  Whether she fell for Oscar or she just saw her chance, Petrona moved with him to Buenos Aires in 1916 when she was only twenty.  He seems to have been in no hurry to make her an honest woman, and they lived with his family until the mid-1920s when they finally married. He found a job at the post office, but the salary was low and Petrona, who by now must have been used to fending for herself, wanted more.  She answered an advertisement looking for women to do cooking demonstrations on the new gas stoves being promoted by the company Primitivo.  In 1928, against the wishes of her husband and his family, she took the position. 

Primitivo sent her and a dozen other women to the Buenos Aires outpost of the Cordon Bleu, where they were trained as ecónomas – home economics experts – who would teach cooking to potential customers and their servants.  She learned the basics of classic French cuisine and soon was preparing full meals in store windows and theatres.  These demonstrations were part serious instruction, with the audience taking notes and asking questions, and part culinary circus.  After placing food in the ovens, the económas locked the doors with a padlock, ostentatiously walking away to mingle with the crowd while it cooked to prove that unlike a coal or wood-fired stoves, no tending was required for a perfect result in exactly the specified time.  Samples were passed around to those lucky enough to sit in the front rows and the rest of meals were raffled off at the end of the show.  Petrona’s classes were so popular that over the course of several years thousands of women attended them, eager to learn the trick of making sophisticated French foods like mayonnaise, meringues and puff pastry, and to watch her create British style layer cakes with fondant icing and fanciful decorations.  (For a fuller description of the evolution of the económas and the spread of new cooking norms in Argentina, see Chapters 1-3 in Creating A Common Table.)

Petrona took her role as a teacher seriously, projecting a sense of professionalism combined with down-home directness that can be seen in her tv shows and in the short, straight-forward Introduction to her book:

In this cookbook I want to help any woman who loves the art of cooking. With it, anyone, no matter how inexperienced, can make the most exquisite dishes. The recipes are explained clearly and simply. When you try them out I only ask that you read attentively, use the exact quantities and good quality ingredients, that you follow the instructions precisely, and when in doubt, take a look at the section of helpful hints.

She called the people who attended her demonstrations, and who later read her magazine columns and listened to her on the radio and television, her students. Throughout her 50-year career she unfailingly replied to each of the thousands of letters and phone calls she received.  As described in Creating a Common Table (p. 180), her granddaughter recounted that even on Christmas Eve she would get up from the table to answer inquiries from anxious cooks making pan dulce or an elaborate roast.  She said that her grandmother felt that people had placed their trust in her recipes, spent their money on the ingredients, and she wanted them to succeed.

Mimi also gave cooking classes, and she too loved the role of teacher and guide.  In the 1970s she taught “international cooking” to adults in evening courses at the local high school.  In the industrial kitchen set up for Home Economics classes, the students prepared a full menu and then settled down to consume the results.  Mimi loved to tell the story of the pitiful school principal lured irresistibly from his office by the smell of her cooking. “Don’t tell my wife – she would kill me for even looking.  My heart, you know.  But just one taste …” Her occasionally sly sense of humour was on display when she presented her students with a recipe for “gaucho casserole”— a dish she had improvised and then gleefully passed off as an Argentine specialty.  Although a generation apart, for both Petrona and Mimi, personal aspiration and achievement were something to hide not display.  Petrona attributed her decision to write a cookbook not to her own ambition, but to the persistent requests of her audience.  Mimi was proud of being paid to teach, but also couched it as a selfless mission to help hapless norteamericanos learn to cook something decent for themselves and their families instead of subsisting on tv dinners, jello mold and fluffernutters.

As Pite’s book documents so clearly, one of Petrona’s achievements was to evolve and reinvent herself with the changing times in Argentina.  During the rollercoaster years of hyper-inflation and periodic food rationing she modified her recipes to make them cheaper, and to use more easily available ingredients.  As nationalism and recognition of the distinct cultures within the country grew, so did the number of recipes for criollo dishes from the provinces that were the hybrid offshoots of Spanish and native cuisines.  More subtly, she adapted to the changing perception of women’s place in society and the centrality of the ama de casa by offering advice for how to make cooking simpler for those who worked or did not have the time or inclination to make elaborate preparations. 

I think we often fail to consider how women like Petrona and Mimi must have experienced the changes in social roles that swept around them. Petrona had already done what most women could not: she had seized her chances and become a professional who made enough money to build herself a house across the street from the President.  But this must have felt like a dangerous game.  As Rebekah Pite astutely points out, she consistently obscured the fact that she was responsible for her own success, hiding it from others and probably from herself.  To take credit for achievement, to take pride in fame or flaunt your wealth would be unladylike and could invite envy and hostility.  For Mimi, the tension was possibly greater. She would have reveled in creating and running a business as Petrona had done, but her more staunchly middle-class up-bringing would never have allowed it.  She was no wild provincial who could run away from home.  Her family had striven for upward mobility so that she could be a gracious ama de casa; betraying that upbringing would have betrayed the people who had worked so long to place her there.  She turned her energies to home and family, focusing her ambition on the ideal of femininity that her society and Petrona’s own book purveyed.  But times were changing, the ama de casa was no longer the ideal, and her accomplishments were even derided by the younger generation – women like her daughter and myself.  How then to maintain the fierce ambition, pride and intelligence?  Daughters forget that our choices are the product of our mother’s compromises.  Petrona cooked to push her way into the elite and to exercise her lively mind and endless energy.  Mimi cooked to affirm her allegiance to middle class values and to her Argentinian heritage in rootless North America.  I chose to learn to cook to reinvent a family table that is an idealized throw-back to both of them.  Now, when I feel rebuked by the next wave for not being sufficiently feminist, or still eating meat, or otherwise lagging behind the curve, I see that every generation must meet with change and see its ambitions and ideals smashed and left behind, while still maintaining pride in our own strivings and revolutions.