The Luxury of Time and Turrón
Turrón requires egg yolks, sugar, and depending on your commitment to the dessert, an entire day blocked off the calendar. Turrón means different things to different cultures throughout Latin America. In Argentina, your understanding of the confection often denotes your place of origin. In Buenos Aires, the sudden appearance of hard sugar and peanut candy bars in kiosks and grocery stores means that Christmas is quickly approaching. In the far northwest provinces of Salta and Tucumán, you’ll spot them in markets and street stalls in the form of an alfajor the size of a baseball, two thin wafers stuffed with a marshmallowy filling. Both versions taste artificial, childish. When I got a phone call from the head of tourism of Belén, a small town surrounded by velvety hills in the province of Catamarca, to inform me that a woman was waiting to show me how to make it, I wasn’t particularly excited.
I arrived at the home of Rosa Palavecino and Mario Herrera and was surprised to see them making turrón the old-fashioned way, churning egg yolks, sugar, and a homemade grape syrup by hand. There isn’t a machine that can beat everything to the right consistency, at least that’s what Mario says, and so he and Rosa take turns whipping for four full hours, five minutes with Mario, five minutes with Rosa, and back and forth over and over again. The five minutes of rest isn’t really rest; they have to pay constant attention to the heat on the copper pot. If it gets too warm, the bottom might burn; if they stop moving for too long, the yolks could break. As each minute passes, the risk of everything falling apart weighs heavier.
This job used to take eight hours of whipping over a wood-burning fire. Domestic workers were fed breakfast, lunch, snack, and dinner by their bosses, and children were not allowed because (I love this superstition) they bring bad luck and break the cream. Rosa and Mario begin prepping around noon and finish at 11pm. After making the turrón, Rosa spoons it between two lard wafers and spreads on an Italian meringue by hand, literally, with a glove and fingers, to make sure that the coating is even.
Rosa and Mario are both retired. When Palavecino stopped teaching, she began dedicating more time to her pastries. The duo sells mostly for fun, or in the case of the turrón, guided by the desire to keep the recipe from disappearing. Industrialized factories and independent bakers make turrón as well, and it’s easy to spot them. Those are only whipped for an hour with an electric mixer, Rosa says with distaste.
Her turrones are lopsided and delicate—little sugary snowflakes—every single one unique but uniform in flavor, a cloudy center that slowly dissolves across the palate, the saccharine sweetness forming a layer that wraps itself around the tongue. She gifted me a dozen. I’ve eaten half of them over the last three weeks. I eat one at a time, savoring each bite, they burn themselves onto my palate’s memory for long enough that I can wait a few days for another.
I walked back to my hotel and ran into Doña Tonita, a cook I had interviewed the day before. “I was just with Rosa and Mario making turrón!” She stopped me (what?!), ready to drop everything and run over to secure a stash. Her face fell when I explained they were for their granddaughter's quinceñera.
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I think often about how great food can be when time is not a luxury, when a maker’s needs are met, and their dedication to craft compensated. Would we pay more for a product we can’t find in abundance? Food that isn’t always available? A flavor that is special because, like Rosa’s lopsided turrones, they represent an individual maker, both creatively and financially. What happens to workers when our food is industrialized? When the availability of abundance is all that matters to us? Who profits from that? And what do we, as consumers, gain by having a consistent supply of identical products?
After meeting with Rosa, I commented to a friend about my surprise at the work it involved, and how much joy she got from it. “Some people like to work like servants,” he responded jokingly. Isn’t it the opposite, I thought to myself, her choosing to dedicate her time to this dessert? Is it not the worker on the factory line making turrón that works like a servant? Is it a coincidence that the final flavor of both is incomparable?
I met with Rosa and Mario midway through my trip, which is currently coming to its end after six weeks of traveling through three different provinces in the Argentine Northwest. The same conversation plays out over and over again. Argentina is losing recipes because there isn’t enough time to make them.
I met with cook Olga Balderrama in Santa Maria, Catamarca, who has taken over her family ranch. “When I was a kid and my grandparents lived here,” she told me. “They harvested, cooked, and ate. Every single day, life revolved around what they ate.” Her grandparents were almost completely self-sufficient and what they couldn’t make themselves, they traded. The only thing they purchased was yerba mate, which only grows in the far Northeast, and coffee, an import.
In Amaicha del Valle, Tucumán, I met with Horacio Díaz, the town cacique and the president of a cooperative of indigenous wine makers. “This sommelier from the United States came and was so in love with the town, that life is simpler and people live from the land,” he explained. “My aunt got a little upset. To outsiders, this life is romantic, but for us, it’s a lot of hard work every single day.”
Throughout this trip, I’ve heard another talking point pop up frequently: no one wants to work. I hear this mostly from men and white people, and it is, obviously, untrue and filtered through the Argentine experience of labor opportunities (often) being segregated by racialized class structures. Lower-class women of color are expected to be the stewards of ancestral culinary tradition in the total absence of a support system. The deteriorating value of their work, once part of an intricate communal lifestyle that today hardly exists, and the changing economic necessities of the average household leave little choice but to abandon ancestral farming and the dishes that spring from those harvests. In order to preserve historic recipes, we have to rethink the future of work.
“Life wasn’t easy but it was also much simpler,” said Doña Tonita. “Fifty years ago, you walked around Belén and every home was a small business. What you didn’t make yourself, you traded or supported your neighbor’s business. A farmer, a weaver, a seamstress, a cobbler, a baker. That has all disappeared. Now, having children is more expensive, we need a cell phone, internet, cable, computer, all these new things which are great but the value of our work didn’t modernize alongside the cost of modern life. Most people are forced to become employees or escape to some factory job in the city.”
In the mountain village of La Puerta, tucked 50 kilometers up a windy dirt road, I met with Doña Matilde, who still lives almost completely off her land. She grabbed a handful of dried capia, a white corn native to Northwest Argentina, and spread it over a millstone built into the kitchen. Communal millstones used to be found in the town center but now the few home cooks that continue to use them have set them up in their own homes. She ground the corn with a long, rounded rock, and in five minutes, we had frangollo, a mealy flour with pieces of corn about the size of a grain of quinoa. We added it to a ceramic pot of boiling water with some salt and leftover pieces of kid goat, and in 20 minutes we had soup, or tulpo, topped with fresh green onion tops and oregano.
This is a common breakfast, although most people don’t grind the frangollo themselves anymore. “I only make eat frangollo this way,” explains Matilde. “The stuff I buy from the store just doesn’t taste as good.”
I ate flavorful soups with storebought frangollo — a consolation I’m willing to settle for — but nothing like this. Salty like fresh popcorn, slightly sweet, the broth had thickened almost like a gravy, green onion and oregano added a welcome acidity. I ate three servings. It’ll probably be the first and only time that I taste that flavor.