Just as Italian American food has become proudly distinct from Italian cuisine, Argentinian cooks make Italian-ish recipes all their own.
Doña Tonita emerges from the kitchen into the wood-paneled dining room of her namesake restaurant to greet me. She supports herself with both hands on a dark-blue and white-streaked melamine tabletop that looks like a constellation. Over her shoulder and out the window, I can see the outline of the Andean hills that hug the town as the sun drops behind them, briefly tinting the sky rose and copper.
The Italian cognates for Doña Tonita’s diet — canelones like cannelloni, ravioles like ravioli, ñoquis like gnocchi — might lead you to believe these are mimetic Italian dishes. But the flavors are layered on top of Belén’s many historic foodways. Just give her bolognesa a whiff.
But many conflate those lasting culinary influences to argue that Argentina’s cuisine never grew into its own, or that it shouldn’t. In a 2021 article in Argentinian daily Infobae titled “Is Italian Food in Argentina just a Criollo Illusion?” Italian journalist Nunzia Locatelli writes, “In Argentina, Italian food continues to be linked to the memory of a plump grandmother that woke up at dawn to prepare ragú or make pasta dough.
Del Pratello, one of Buenos Aires’s many new fábricas de pasta, or pasta factories, which specializes in Italian pasta shapes. Milanesa a la napolitana is the archetype of cooking in this environment. The dish was created in the 1930s or ’40s when a cook burnt a milanesa and camouflaged his error with ham, tomato, and cheese. That origin story is about more than a cook caught in a lunch rush. Argentinidad is the shared experience of creativity among chaos.
“The pasta that we eat isn’t Italian and we have no reason to pretend that it is,” Perticone says. “It’s ours.”, particularly Paraguay and Peru, make up nearly 80 percent of foreign residents in Argentina. The Eurocentric culinary ideology has begun to reverse in the last decade, opening the door for more chefs to express their version of tipo Italiana.
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