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121 chapter four professionalizing a thriftier homemaker Supremas de Pollo Maryland (Maryland-Style Chicken) 6 chicken breasts, salt, pepper, beaten egg, breadcrumbs, oil 12 bananas, beaten egg, breadcrumbs, oil 50 grams butter, 1 onion, 1 can of corn, ½ cup of thick white sauce, salt, pepper, nutmeg 6 slices of ham, 6 bundles of spinach, ½ kilo of peas, butter Prepare the chicken, cut the wing bones, leaving the little part of the bone that is attached to the breast, remove the breast bone, take off the skin too and flatten the [chicken pieces] making them thin; season with salt and pepper, dunk them in beaten egg, then breadcrumbs and fry them in oil over a slow flame. Peel the bananas, cut them in half lengthwise, dunk them in beaten egg, then breadcrumbs and fry them in oil. Brown the finely minced onion in butter, add the corn, sauté a moment and add a nice and thick white sauce, salt, pepper and nutmeg. Heat the slices of ham. Cook the spinach, strain it and sauté it in butter. Cook the peas, strain them, and sauté them in butter. Once everything is prepared, put the chicken in a serving dish; over each one a slice of ham and two banana halves. Around [it, place] the spinach, corn and peas, everything nice and warm.1 Doña Petrona presented this recipe, Maryland-Style Chicken, in her cookbook and on her television program during the 1950s.2 It was a dish that reflected Argentina’s culinary diversity and the growing interest in the cuisine of the Americas. The name of this recipe referred to a classic preparation , Maryland Chicken, a dish from the state of the same name in which the chicken is pan-fried and covered to steam it and then served with white, creamy gravy.3 Petrona’s recipe also called for chicken with a white sauce, 122 Professionalizing a Thriftier Homemaker but someone from Maryland would have been unlikely to recognize it. This chicken was fried, not steamed, and then topped with ham and two banana slices—and the white sauce was chock-full of corn. Such additions reflected typical Latin American ingredients. Despite Petrona’s attempts to reach a broader audience that included working-class women during the late 1940s, she continued to cater to an audience with ample leisure time and money. As with her previous recipes, her Maryland-Style Chicken involved a lot of steps and ingredients. The cook would debone six chicken quarters and fry them, fry a dozen bananas, make a white sauce with creamed corn, heat the ham, cook the spinach and peas, and then assemble the dish artfully on a platter—making sure to keep “everything nice and warm.” During the 1950s, homemakers were expected to have the skills (or at least the desire to learn these skills) and the enthusiasm to prepare this type of dish for their family and friends. Properly executed, such a dish showcased their domestic dedication and expertise as well as their cosmopolitan repertoire. As the Cold War intensified in the 1950s, the U.S. government and corporate interests stepped up campaigns to promote capitalist consumption throughout the Americas. For its part, the Peronist government would seek to keep U.S. imperialism at bay during the first half of the decade, while subsequent Argentine leaders would aim to roll back nationalist protections . As Argentina turned away from Europe and looked to the United States for investments, it imported not only companies and capital but also cultural notions, including the U.S. image of the idealized 1950s housewife. Since the 1930s, Doña Petrona had kept up-to-date on U.S. ideas about domesticity and consumption by subscribing to magazines published there, such as Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping. She also faithfully clipped articles by U.S. advice expert Dorothy Dix, which were reprinted in Spanish in the popular women’s magazine, Para Ti.4 Still, Doña Petrona and others selected the parts of the image of the U.S. housewife they wanted to emulate and tailored them to the local environment . Like her counterpart in the United States, the ideal Argentine ama de casa was popularly imagined to be efficient, white, self-consciously middle class, and cheerful in catering to her family—and especially to her husband.5 At the same time, contemporaries expected her to be more dedicated to cooking from scratch than they imagined her U.S. counterpart to be.6 She...

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