Creating a Common Table in Twentieth-Century Argentina: Doña Petrona, Women, and Food by Rebekah E. Pite (review)

Reading about Argentine culinary writer and multimedia personality Petrona Carrizo de Gandulfo, (or Doña Petrona for short), I found myself intellectually engaged as a scholar and personally touched as an Argentine national. The presence of Doña Petrona in households like the one in which I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s was so ubiquitous that was easy to take her for granted. I remember my mother, whenever her work shift allowed, watching Doña Petrona’s afternoon cooking show and scribbling notes straight from the TV screen. The food was delicious, even though I suspect that following Doña Petrona’s recommendations imposed an additional burden on my mother’s scarce time outside the factory and our tight family budget. But by following Doña Petrona’s model, if one subscribes to Rebekah Pite’s analysis, my mother was sitting our family at the Argentine ‘common table,’ just as millions of other women were doing with their own families.

Pite has conducted spectacular research among primary, secondary, and oral sources to uncover the exceptional life of Doña Petrona over eight decades of Argentine history. Born in one of the poorest provinces of the country, Petrona Carrizo de Gandulfo moved to her husband’s home in Buenos Aires in the mid-1920s with little or no experience in the kitchen. By the end of the 1930s she was conducting the most popular radio cooking show of the time, writing for widely read magazines, and giving live demonstrations in packed auditoriums. El Libro de Doña Petrona, her 1937 cookbook, became an instant best seller; through several revisions and re-editions, more than 3 million copies were sold before its author’s death in 1992. In the early 1950s, Doña Petrona became an Argentine television pioneer, creating a cooking show that for 30 years supplied flavorful dishes and held a revered place in popular culture.

Pite’s reconstruction goes beyond Doña Petrona’s life story to illustrate the deeper social trends that defined womanhood and domesticity in Argentina and the wider world during these years. The metaphorical concept of the ‘common table’ refers here less to the creation of a national cuisine than to the ideal of national commensality, where families across regional and class boundaries enjoyed plentiful, varied, and healthy food. It also summarizes the ideal of middle- class domesticity that encouraged married women to seek both thriftiness and creativity in the kitchen and, more generally, everywhere in the home. Many would see in this description the vision of social justice and female domesticity championed by Juan and Eva Perón, but, as Pite convincingly demonstrates, Doña Petrona embodied and promoted these ideals not only during the Perón government but before and after it. Indeed, Doña Petrona’s life and work dovetailed with the upward social mobility and consumption boom of the first Peronist government, bringing middle-class notions of respectability to the working-class table. She also advocated for married women to stay home, or spend most of their time outside their paid jobs catering delicacies for their husbands and children, even when the rapid turns of the economy forced women to become breadwinners and bread itself became scarce.

As she navigated the economic and political storms that famously characterized those years in modern Argentina, Doña Petrona managed to maintain her ascendancy in the domestic realm by constantly adapting her recipes and keeping herself away from political fracas. As Pite reconstructs the various challenges Doña Petrona managed to sort out and overcome, she never loses sight of common Argentine women from a diversity of social and geographical backgrounds. These women’s everyday challenges to live up to the ideals of domesticity promoted by Doña Petrona come to life through interviews excerpted and quoted through the book. [End...