I’ve had a cough since early June. It started the week of my birthday, stole my voice and sabotaged my party, and continued—waking up with a swollen and scratchy throat is the anthem of this winter. I’ve loaded my body with green tea and lemon, sucked down entire bags of lozenges (of which there was briefly a shortage!), and when neither soothed the itch, pills. Nothing lasts. When I think I’ve exorcised it from my body, cough cough. 

This week I arrived in Catamarca, a province that spreads over the mountains and valleys of Argentina’s northern Andes region. I have never gotten around to applying for a license and so I depend on the bounty of the bus system, its only generosity being its economy. On Saturday, I spent four and a half hours on a double-decker bus climbing through hills that rolled into the distance as far as my eyes could see. The thin highway zigzagged through the landscape, demanding the bus to creep at a sloth’s pace and lulling most of the passengers to sleep, and thus, making me hyper-aware of my hacking. The woman in front of me noticed too—every cough was her reminder to pull her mask back up over her nose. 

When I arrived to Belén, a small town surrounded by crocodile green hills that turn yellow and purple as the sun falls behind them, I was greeted by Luisa Brizuela and her husband Juan. “I have something for your cough,” Luisa said as we cleared the table on her front porch. “Juan makes the best arrope de chañar in town.” 

Chañar is a tree that grows in the warm forests that sweep across the northern half of Argentina. In Belén, they are plentiful. You can spot them between the palm trees with their hunched trunks and bursts of yellow amongst pale green leaves. But I couldn’t find the fruits on the ground. “Everything that isn’t cooked gets eaten up by the bugs,” Juan told me. The fruits are rich in natural sugars and are boiled in water until thick, caramel-like liquid forms. Indigenous tribes used it as an anti-inflammatory; locals—mixed descendants of Native Diaguitas, Africans, and Spaniards—continue to use it for coughs and sore throats although it’s also used to prepare desserts. Food as both medicine and pleasure. 

“A university studied the medicinal properties of chañar and confirmed what we already knew,” explained Luisa. 

Luisa instructed me to pour some onto a spoon and gulp it down. It tastes like honey and chocolate with a touch of hickory and salt. Arrope is sold in shops all over Belén, although many homes make their own. I bought one that was ‘prepared and jarred by Doña Sonia Monroy de Jimenez of Andalgala, Catamarca. Ingredients: chañar.” Every morning, I take a spoonful and can feel my throat loosen. I would have never known this if I were a different kind of traveler; if I didn’t let locals guide my trip.

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Lots of people will tell you that Argentina is many countries in one: Patagonia, the middle Pampas, the central Cuyo, the Northwest (or NOA), the Northeast (or NEA), and of course, Buenos Aires city and suburbs, which both are many universes unto themselves. It’s easy to travel in Argentina—not logistically, of course, to travel well requires a car and money. Argentina is uniform, at least in the food, which is what I travel for. This week I’ve been interviewing women who are experts in mote, a hominy and meat stew. I ask each one about their favorite meals. A common response is ñoquis con estofado, or gnocchi with braised beef. This answer doesn’t surprise me. No matter where I am in the country I can always count on finding asado, milanesa, pizza, or a plate of pasta, and more recently, hamburgers. I imagine that is comforting for a certain kind of traveler. The other night I dined in a restaurant that overlooked the main plaza. A family of four with Buenos Aires accents sat at the table beside me and each ordered the same exact dish: Grilled tenderloin with french fries. The table next to them was filled with lasagna and canelones. This isn’t an indictment against noodles or milanesa—people can like what they like. It’s the ubiquity of the former that bores me; its posturing as the kind of food that is more acceptable, more sophisticated, more Argentine. 

I think a lot about what it means to be from a place. Probably because my ‘place’ is always on display. Depending on my energy to invest in the mechanics of my accent, people either assume that I’m from some lesser known province (San Luis? Chubut?) or guess French or German. A gringo from the United States is always met with surprise. “California!” they yell. And I begin to define the place that I was born. There is the reality and my retelling of it—it’s impossible to encompass a place in a few words, and so I must choose mine wisely. I grew up in a rural town but studied by the beach, the food and people are diverse, housing is impossible. 

My origin also conditions how I am guided through my travels, the stories people think I’d be interested in hearing, the ones they leave out. I constantly am wondering: what is the reality and what is the retelling? 

When Netflix’s Street Food came to Argentina, they had a country full of street foods to choose from. The most memorable meals I’ve had in all my travels through the north have been at a picnic table on the patio of a private home—when the customers clear, the crumbs are swept to the ground and the family sits down to reclaim their dining table. These spots are difficult for outsiders to find, far from the main square and never in the pamphlets, they hand out at the tourist office. The producers chose a tortilla española, bending over backward to make a dish exclusively served in bars and restaurants feel ‘street’. The women de la 3 have capitalized off that positioning — fine — but why is that visibility never extended elsewhere? 

I carry my camera with me everywhere and people always stare. If they don’t stare outright as I stand over my plate, they glance at one another from the corner of their eyes. Sometimes someone can’t contain a giggle. I hate this, of course, but I suppose the constant observer must understand how it feels to be observed. I understand the stares. Lina Segovia has been cooking mote and jigote on a wood-burning stove in her backyard for the last 28 years. She began, as do many women in Belén, cooking the food she watched other women prepare for a fundraiser to buy uniforms for the elementary school. People like her food and so she decided to turn it into a business. Every Friday at 4pm her sister and mother-in-law, begin boiling hominy,  beans, and ossobuco, before kneading dough and making filling for empanadas. At 6am the next morning, they stuff the empanada shells and make jigote, a potato and beef casserole once shared amongst neighbors after community harvest. I’m not a cook. I’ve never studied or worked in a restaurant. Now it was me staring at her flabbergasted. To her, this food is ordinary, in another sphere from what is served in a formal restaurant or given a close-up shot on international television — why have we let that become the definition of food culture?

I think it’s the opposite. There is nothing extraordinary about a tortilla española or milanesa. Sure, they identify a nation but aren’t special—what could be more ordinary than a dish that the entire country knows how to make? It’s the foods from a specific place that taste like the land they come from that have real value. The origins of mote predate colonialism. Its two main ingredients—hominy and beans—are the hallmark ingredients up and down the Americas. Argentina is a nation that, alongside the United States, is one of the clearest examples of erasure of pre-Columbian culture. The mote that is cooked in the home and sold back to the community — a circular exchange that keeps many homes afloat — is pretty extraordinary. These stories deserve to be on full display. 

I haven’t sold a story from this trip yet. Every story I pitch, editors inevitably ask: Why now? I don’t know how to respond to this effectively. I find this question counterintuitive to writing, which to me, is less about consumption and more about documentation. If not now, then when? 

 

MATAMBRE is a reader-funded fanzine and journal dedicated to exploring the socio-economic and political impacts of our food systems from the perspective of Buenos Aires and Argentina. If you think work like this is valuable and would like to support local and independent journalism, please support with a monthly subscription beginning at just $2 a month.

main image: Doña Lina’s kitchen; Bélen, Catamarca, AR

above: Doña Molina’s mote at the San Roque Festival; San José, Catamarca, AR