Creating a Common Table in Twentieth-Century Argentina

Doña Petrona, Women, and Food

Rebekah E. Pite

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781469606903, 9781469606897
• eBook ISBN: 9781469606910
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'America Latina e dei Caraibi

Doña Petrona C. de Gandulfo (c. 1896–1992) reigned as Argentina’s preeminent domestic and culinary expert from the 1930s through the 1980s. An enduring culinary icon thanks to her magazine columns, radio programs, and television shows, she was likely second only to Eva Perón in terms of the fame she enjoyed and the adulation she received. Her cookbook garnered tremendous popularity, becoming one of the three best-selling books in Argentina. Doña Petrona capitalized on and contributed to the growing appreciation for women’s domestic roles as the Argentine economy expanded and fell into periodic crises. Drawing on a wide range of materials, including her own interviews with Doña Petrona’s inner circle and with everyday women and men, Rebekah E. Pite provides a lively social history of twentieth-century Argentina, as exemplified through the fascinating story of Doña Petrona and the homemakers to whom she dedicated her career.
Pite’s narrative illuminates the important role of food — its consumption, preparation, and production — in daily life, class formation, and national identity. By connecting issues of gender, domestic work, and economic development, Pite brings into focus the critical importance of women’s roles as consumers, cooks, and community builders.

Chapter One
The Elevation of Cooking in Turn-of-the-Century Argentina

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Pastelitos de Dulce (Quince-Filled Pastries)

Place on the table, in the form of a crown, 500 grams of flour; in the middle put 100 grams of butter, one cup of water, a pinch of salt and form a dough that is neither too hard nor too soft; smooth it out and allow it to rest for a moment. Then stretch it, leaving it at the thickness of one finger, spread it with 50 grams of soft butter, sprinkle flour on it and fold it in half; spread it with butter again and fold it so that it is folded in four; stretch it with the rolling pin and cut it into very thin strips that are six centimeters wide; cut this, forming squares, put a little bit of melted quince paste, wet the borders with water, cover it with another square and form the pasteles. Fry them in warm lard at first and hot lard after, submerging them frequently with a spoon.

Prepare a syrup: Put in a pan 400 grams of refined sugar, cover it with water, add a small bar of vanilla and let it boil for a few minutes; dip the pastelitos in the syrup and dust them with sprinkles. It is necessary to allow them to come to a boil in the syrup. The quince paste has to be melted over heat.¹

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As a child, Petrona Carrizo prepared pastelitos de dulce. As this 1934 recipe in the first edition of her cookbook attests, there were many steps. First the cook mixed, kneaded, and smoothed the dough. Then she covered it with butter. After that she folded the dough a couple of times to give the pastry layers. Then she cut the dough into squares, at which point she dabbed some melted quince paste in between two squares and sealed the edges. The next step was to fry the pastelitos in a pot of increasingly hot lard. And the final steps called for making a simple syrup and then dunking the fried pastry into it and covering the pastelitos with sprinkles.

Despite her childhood expertise at preparing this tasty and complicated treat, Petrona did not publicly describe it as the start of her cooking career. In numerous interviews with the media, she proudly mentioned that she began her culinary career in the late 1920s as an ecónoma (corporate home economist) for the English gas company La Compañía Primitiva de Gas and trained as a student at the French culinary institute Le Cordon Bleu around the same time. In turn, she seemed to revel in declaring that she never learned to cook as a child or young woman. Describing her reluctance to enter the kitchen, she remarked, “My mother owned the best boardinghouse [pensión] in Santiago del Estero and she called me [into the kitchen] many times to watch how she cooked, but I didn’t pay attention; it was not interesting to me.”² She repeatedly told reporters, “Not even a lasso could get me into the kitchen.”³

Notwithstanding her public disavowal, Petrona did enter the kitchen, according to her niece, Olga, and her unpublished memoirs. Apparently Petrona’s mother cajoled her daughter into making pastelitos. Petrona’s quince-filled pastries “opened up like a flower,” Olga recalled, “even though she did not like to make them and cried when forced to do so.”⁴ Her expertise at making these complicated and tasty criollo treats replicated the experience of many generations of women across Argentina, especially in the northwestern provinces, where they were (and still are) a popular treat.⁵ This familiarity is evident in Petrona C. de Gandulfo’s recipe—the cook must know how to make pastry dough that is “neither too hard nor too soft.” At the same time, she suggested that even experienced cooks would benefit from more precise, modern measurements in specifying, for example, the exact number of centimeters for each strip of dough.

What can we learn from this story about a girl who did not like to cook and ended up pursuing a cooking career? And why was she so eager to avoid the kitchen in the first place? As we shall see, Petrona’s journey from despairingly making pastelitos in Santiago del Estero to proudly leading cooking classes for Primitiva in Buenos Aires is a story that speaks to more than one woman’s personal history. Indeed, it is a story that, when taken together with others, reveals the constraints and opportunities that women in Buenos Aires navigated with a gendered modernization of the economy that celebrated men’s paid extradomestic work and women’s unpaid domestic roles. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Argentina’s booming liberal economy lined the pockets of wealthy families while further impoverishing the poor majority. At the same time, it also enabled a much smaller number of urban dwellers to carve out a new respectable middling status and a belief in progress. Most families earned this respectability through men’s white-collar work and women’s homemaking. But it was an open question which aspect of homemaking respectable women should focus on. As we shall see, marketers, mass media outlets, home economists, and many women gravitated toward the culinary arts. In so doing, they elevated the status of cooking from something associated with servants and poor women at the turn of the century to an endeavor worthy of “respectable” women’s attention by the 1920s.

Santiago del Estero

Little is known about most ordinary people’s lives in turn-of-the-century Santiago del Estero.⁶ While her subsequent fame shed light on her provincial origins, Petrona’s early life is no exception. In the late 1980s, Petrona C. de Gandulfo enlisted the help of a writer, Oscar Alberto Cejas, to compose a history of her life, which, among other things, provided a narrative about her childhood. However, she never published this document. According to Marcela Massut, her grandmother did not like the way in which it portrayed her as being very provincial and unrefined, or as she apparently put it, del campo (from the countryside).⁷ This dissatisfaction is telling, as throughout her career she would seek to craft a public image that was decidedly more urbane and cosmopolitan than country bumpkin. However, as a migrant from the provinces (even one from her province’s capital city), that was not always an easy task. As Buenos Aires asserted its dominance and superiority over the rest of the nation, porteños tended to dub common people from the “interior” as inferior and even “barbaric.” Most famously, during the mid-nineteenth century, writer (and future president) Domingo F. Sarmiento lastingly divided Argentina into the “civilized” city and the “barbaric” interior.⁸

Petrona Carrizo was born on the outskirts of the provincial capital of Santiago del Estero during the last decade of the nineteenth century. She claimed her birth year to be 1898, although it was probably a little earlier, in 1896 or even as early as 1890.⁹ Named Petrona after San Pedro, the saint who shared her birthday, she was the sixth of seven children (five girls and two boys). She spent her early childhood on a quinta (small rural estate), which she described in her memoirs as “spacious and comfortable,” with various rooms and a patio surrounded by fruit trees.¹⁰ In contrast, the vast majority of santiagueños lived in humble one-room dwellings that dotted the dry scrubland of this province.¹¹ These modest dwellings and their inhabitants shaped the predominant view within Argentina of Santiago del Estero as being particularly rural and poor.

Petrona’s parents played a large role in securing what she later described as a “comfortable” home.¹² Her mother, Clementina Ramasco, oversaw the household and raised her children with the help of a wet nurse. According to Petrona, her mother’s father came from Piedmont, Italy, and her maternal grandmother was native to the province. As such, Clementina represented one of the contemporary uses of the term criolla in Argentina (mestiza in most other parts of Latin America) due to her combination of indigenous and European ancestry.¹³ While Petrona never met her mother’s parents, she described frequent visits from her maternal great-grandfather with his “unmistakably indigenous features,” who would arrive on horseback from the hills of Serra de Guasayán bearing sacks filled with dried cobs of corn.¹⁴ In turn, Petrona’s father, Manuel Carrizo, died when she was just six years old, leaving her with only a vague memory of a “tall, good looking Basque man who, according to what was said, was a tireless traveler.”¹⁵ Perhaps, if the quinta was as “comfortable” as Petrona’s memoirs suggested, he worked as a relatively successful traveling merchant. Still, it is unclear that Petrona’s mother and father were actually married.¹⁶ If this was the case, characterizing her father as a traveler might have been part of an effort to preserve a greater veneer of respectability for the Carrizo family.

In any case, the Carrizos were not among the poorest santiagueño families. This was a family that did not have to put their children to work (at least for the time being) and sent their children to public schools, something that just under half the population in this province was able to do.¹⁷ Petrona described herself as not being that interested in school when she attended the primary school of Zorilla de Santiago. Still, there were some bright moments. In her memoirs, she proudly recalled a paper she wrote based on a romanticized provincial history entitled Madre de ciudades (Mother of Cities), the nickname her provincial capital claimed as the oldest continuously populated city in (what would become) Argentina. Some eight decades later, she remembered her description of how “the small farms and homes kept popping up, of the magnificent countryside offered by the plains, and of vegetation that members of the expedition had not seen the likes of before.” She also recalled her teacher’s public praise for her decision to end this paper with a popular Quechua sign-off, “Allita Chayay, Heraccochi.”¹⁸ As this anecdote suggests, Petrona grew up surrounded by provincial patriotism in a place where Quechua, the language of many indigenous Andeans, was commonplace and where, at the same time, the European “founding fathers” were celebrated as heroes in public schools.¹⁹ In addition, her strong memory of this paper shows her precociousness as well as her interest in underscoring her (provincial) urbanity.

Despite the initiative Petrona showed on this paper, when her mother encouraged her to become a teacher she was not interested. She later explained in her memoirs, “I thought teachers’ destinies were to remain permanently single, and since the tenderest age, I dreamed of getting married.”²⁰ Whether or not Petrona actually felt this way at the time, marriage promised women a measure of respectability, especially in the provinces, where common law unions predominated among all but the top echelons of society.²¹

Like other girls educated in Argentine public schools during the first decade of the twentieth century, Petrona had been encouraged to prepare herself for domestic life. Whereas late nineteenth-century politicians and home economists had focused their attentions on educating elite women about home economics, by the early twentieth century, state officials along with bourgeois women had begun to target poorer women and girls in Argentina through less-expensive publications and public education.²² In 1884, Argentine politicians mandated that girls learn home economics and related skills like sewing and knitting in public school. As a corollary, boys were at first required to learn basic military and agrarian skills and later, by 1907, manual labor.²³ This was part of a larger effort to address gendered tensions about men’s and women’s proper roles in a modernizing nation in which both sexes were entering the growing industrial workforce in significant numbers.²⁴ Boys were encouraged to develop skills for extradomestic work that would financially support their families, while girls were taught to become well-informed amas de casa (homemakers) who would buttress their husbands’ wage labor with their own unpaid industriousness at home. Male politicians sought to encourage this gendered division of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Creating a Common Table in Twentieth-Century Argentina
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Setting the Table
• Chapter One The Elevation of Cooking in Turn-of-the-Century Argentina
• Chapter Two Creating a Public in Buenos Aires and Beyond
• Chapter Three Expanding Consumption and Middle-Class Domesticity
• Chapter Four Professionalizing a Thriftier Homemaker
• Chapter Five Shifting Priorities and Entertaining Inequalities
• Chapter Six Cooking in and out of the Spotlight
• Conclusion Keeping the Table Set
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index