Cuajada, Heat and Lemon: Arabic Food of the Argentine Northwest
by Amadeo Gandolfo
Artwork by La Delmas
When I was a kid, the family table was filled with a rotation of 25 to 30 dishes. My family ate well, although we were far from sophisticated, no where close to making meals that requirde dozens of steps. We went with what we knew. Lunches revolved around a menu that you will find in any Italo-Hispano establishment and that grace many middle-class Argentine tables: ravioli, milanesa with french fries, lampreado, squash pie (the dish that I hated the most), lasagna, cheese balls, meatballs with rice, potato casserole, tortilla. But amongst so many ‘normal’ dishes there were two singular foods: sfijas and quipe, Middle Eastern empanadas and beef mixed with bulgur.
As a kid, I dealt with severe asthma attacks. They started when I was two years old and continued until I was sixteen. My pediatrician instructed my parents to send me to do any sort of physical activity to combat the tightness in my chest. They sent me to gymnastics classes and the Syrian-Lebanese Society of Tucumán, a distinctive, attention-grabbing building next door to the first (and I think the only) Orthodox churches in the province.
La Sirio (as it is known in Tucumán) doesn’t inspire awe because of its monumentality but rather its style. The entire facade is built on a foundation of horseshoe arches, one of the most recognizable stylistic elements of Islamic architecture. The building is filled with diamond patterns, columns and arches reminiscent of the architecture of Moorish Spain. The right wing houses a restaurant, an enormous salon with large tables and a central space that seems dreamed up for the moment that everyone feels the urge to dance. For years I spent winter in the indoor pool (gigantic to my young eyes) that I learned to swim in.
No one in my family has Arab roots. At least that’s what I always thought. When I started to think back, I remembered that my Aunt Mariana makes excellent tabbouleh and hummus. So I asked my cousin Facundo and he assured me that yes, his grandfather was originally from Syria. Their last name was "something like Estamboule", but on his way to Argentina he passed through Italy and they changed his last name to Stambole, which is how it forever remained. When he arrived in Argentina, he was a strange combination of "Mohometano" (as the General Directorate of Migration called Muslims for a long time) and Italian.
¿NO SOS SUSCRIPTOR PERO TE GUSTA LEER MATAMBRE?
SUSCRIBITE O COMPRAME UN CAFECITO
How did these dishes arrive at my family’s dinner table? I think that they are a testimony to the cultural significance of the Arab community in Tucumán and the entire Argentine Northwest. This migratory process began at the end of the nineteenth century and continued—with the ups and downs of historic changes but always with more coming than going—until about 1975.
Immigrants came mostly from the area around Syria and Lebanon at a time in which the two countries didn’t exist as national entities but rather formed a part of the Ottoman Empire. This is why the vast majority of Arab immigrants are called ‘Turks’ in Argentina—at the time, they were legally Turkish. It is a part of the richness and ambiguity attached to emigration. Many left the Ottoman Empire to escape pressure and state violence exercised against them and would eventually find themselves taking the name of their oppressors in their adopted country.
Today there is little clarity about exactly how many Syrian-Lebanese immigrants entered the country. In many instances, Argentina made their arrival difficult because they weren’t the type of immigrants that the state was interested in. The complicated process of disintegrating an empire also makes it difficult to identify who came from where. Anthropologist Jorge Omar Bestene estimates that between 1890 and 1950, some quarter-million Arabic-speaking immigrants arrived in Argentina.
Many ended up in more centralized, traditional immigrant areas, like Buenos Aires, Santa Fe and the Pampas, yet there was a special predilection for the provinces of the north, where nearly 30% of newly arrived immigrants headed. Why they ended up there is mostly unknown. A chain began and continued; one family member found themselves in the northwest and more and more followed. Maybe it had something to do with the natural landscape—the heat, mountains and valleys—that bring forth illusions of the Levant. A number of social scientists hypothesized that they found fertile ground as skilled vendors where the absence of other immigrant communities posed little competition. Most were small traders and street hawkers, which aligns with stories that my cousin Facundo told me about his grandfather, who erected a fabric store near the bus station as soon as he arrived in Tucumán, as did so many others.
In 1902 an article in Caras y Caretas spoke of a ‘Turkish neighborhood’ in Buenos Aires and highlighted that “many Criollo sociologists found the Turkish immigration exasperating, bringing to the country unnerving activities and poor examples that are harmful to a hard-working population. In the countryside, seeing their skinny, lazy silhouettes cross dusty roads, glued to mysterious boxes, initially provoked ridicule and then bitter resistance, until their customs, familial alliances, and good behavior won over and was concluded to be tolerable and sympathetic”. The article continued to highlight positive qualities of ‘Turkish’ immigration: sobriety, ability to save, humble misdemeanor and adaptability. Their ability to assimilate would later be applauded by Perón, who in 1964 remarked, “The ability to assimilate is, maybe, the most extraordinary quality of a man of action. The Arabs in our land have been an example, maybe, they are the ones who have most quickly assimilated to our motherland and our customs, our glory and our traditions”.
The religious composition was wide-ranging. Although there was a considerable amount of Muslims and Sephardic Jews, many immigrants belonged to diverse Christian denominations that had been persecuted by the Turkish: Maronites, Melkites and Orthodox. This is why the process of culinary fusion and exchange between host communities and immigrants isn’t led by a single, central decree: a clear division of halal and harem. Many of the Muslims who arrived married Catholics, abandoning the use of the Arabic language and creatively interpreting (or discarding altogether) the culinary rules indicated by the Koran. Needless to say, this was never an issue for the Christian majority.
I must confess that the Arabic food we made at home was acceptable but not exactly extraordinary. The sfijas were fine but usually came out dry—the filling was never compact and always fell apart when you started eating, something was missing to bind together the ground beef. The quipe was a big block without a lot of spices and was prepared the way it always is in Tucumán: in the oven like a meatloaf rather than a pan-fried meatball.
As the years went on, I learned to make my favorite dishes myself although I’ve never quite nailed down my hummus. Sometimes I end up making something pretty decent, creamy and packed with just the right combination of nutty chickpea and citrus. Other times it turns out a watery mess. My sfija recipe is the one that a cook ex-girlfriend taught me: diced onion and tomato, ground beef, garlic and lots of spices (pepper, crushed red pepper, cinnamon, sometimes a handful of basil, a touch of ras el hangout) and lots and lots of lemon. My friend Juan Pablo taught me to make quipe, passed down to him by his grandmother who left him her handwritten recipe book. The trick is a bunch of mint chopped very fine.
Arabic food in Tucumán has adapted much in the same way as its makers have to the local culture. We use lemon, one of the most important crops in the province, with savage devotion. Even though lemon is an essential element of food from the Syrian-Lebanese region, I don’t know if it is as omnipresent as it is in Tucumán. The juice is kneaded into the quipe’s meat filling, which creates a chemical reaction that ‘pre-cooks’ the beef and, once cooked, is served with generous squirts of lemon. Hummus follows the same logic, and that extra punch of citrus flavor is one of the things I miss the most when eating it here in Berlin.
There are other foods that arrived and were changed to the point of becoming unrecognizable, as well as other dishes that never took root. Take the kafta. The original form of the kafta is skewered cubes of spiced meat, similar to shish. In Tucumán you can find it prepared that way, but also in another style that for many Tucumanos is far superior. In the Mercado del Norte, a beautiful old building in the capital’s center there is a stall called El Rey del Kipe. The market is a building with traces of art deco contained within a brutalist-functionalist structure. Long corridors are split between fresh food stands (fruits, vegetables, meats and cheeses) and food stands. Some of the most well-known spots serve pizza and milanesa sandwiches. People crowd around bars, surrounded by the smell of overripe food and bleach, and scarf down a slice of pizza, a few empanadas or a kafta. El Rey del Kipe is an expert on the latter. They make their kaftas in the shape of a hamburger but with Middle Eastern spices and lots of lemon juice. The patty is deep-fried in oil that is used and reused (my favorite) and is served in bread like a sandwich, which you can add chopped onion from a bowl that is always sitting in the display case. It’s the best bite of food that you can find in Tucuman’s center on a hungry afternoon on your way back home.
My friend Gustavo mentioned to me that in a number of Arab restaurants in Tucuman the tabule is made with lettuce instead of parsley because immigrants began to associate parsley with poverty since vegetable stands tend to give it away. Something similar happened with the cuajada (or curd), which is the way that we call laban. Cuajada is a dessert made with fermented milk that is eaten in Northern Spain but in Northwest Argentina the tradition mixed with the Syrian-Lebanese custom to accompany savory dishes with yogurt. Someone from the North would never associate cuajada with a dessert but rather a creamy and acidic yogurt that you pile on top of a sfija or stuffed intestine. The mark of a good cuajada is the preservation of the same yogurt over many years, even decades, an ancestral chain.
Another dish that suffered an interesting transformation is the stuffed intestine. A large intestine is lovingly cleaned and, oftentimes, left to tenderize in lemon and water. Later it is stuffed with rice, meat and vegetables (onion is indispensable, some swear on carrots and red bell pepper) and boiled for an hour. More creative cooks duplicate the same process but toss it onto the grill. Originally, the dish was called mombar and fried. It is served with a sauce that is heavy on lemon and garlic. The best version is found at El Balón, an old-school spot in the city’s center, a bit showy, but worth the big bill.
I spoke with my friend Pedro and asked him where are the best places to eat nowadays. He mentioned Shami, a spot that opened ‘not too long ago’ (10 years) that has become well-known for being very quick and having an ‘authentic Arabic’ flavor. What does that mean? Shami combines the logic of a fast food joint with a menu that does justice to a more globalized palate. It’s one of the few places in Tucumán that makes shawarma, the Middle Eastern dish in other cities around the country. I never understood why shawarma never made a mark in the north. Maybe the equipment that is required to cook the meat implied an engineering and investment that most people preferred to dedicate to something simpler like a shop that sells milanesa sandwiches or opted to buy a ‘panchuquera’, a waffle iron that makes the beloved panchuque, a hot dog cooked inside a pancake batter. This brings me to my second hypothesis: it couldn’t compete with the milanesa sandwich or the empanada, the most popular fast foods in the region. Part of the success of the sfija can be explained by its inclusion in many empanada shops, where both are treated as the same dish.
Today, immigration from the Arab world is recognized as the third most important in Argentina, following the more recognizable Italian and Spanish communities. This is something that the people of the Northwest, those of us who have grown up in homes where a creamy humita shared the same table as a hummus, where you can enjoy a pork tamale alongside a quipe topped with crunchy onions, where the flavors of walnuts and tahini lived alongside cumin and green onions, could have told you that a long time ago.
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This article was translated from its original Spanish with the approval of its author—there are small changes for clarity and rhythm.
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Amadeo Gandolfo. Historian and Doctor of Social Sciences. He works in academia and investigates comics as well as works as a professor, curator and culture critic. He is the founder of El Baile Moderno and the editor of the Kamandi, a magazine dedicated to comics critique. He writes the newsletter El Evangelio del Coyote. He loves dancing and Superman. Find him on Twitter.
La Delmas. Illustrator and NFT artist. She was born and raised in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, 100% inspired by her family origins and customs. Lover of homemade food and good meals. Find her on Instagram.