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219 conclusion keeping the table set On 6 February 1992, when Petrona C. de Gandulfo was in her late nineties, she passed away, with Juanita Bordoy at her side. All of the major national papers published obituaries celebrating her tremendous career. The journalists who wrote these articles made simple and yet profound claims about her importance. For example, Fernando Muñoz Pace began his article: “She taught half the world to cook.”1 Renata Rocco-Cuzzi described her as a successful career woman who established herself as an ecónoma and an important writer.2 According to Orlando Barone, Doña Petrona was “number one in the mythology of the cooking genre. Everything begins with and follows from her.”3 Journalists retold many of the stories that Doña Petrona had shared with them and other members of the media throughout the course of her career—her lack of interest in learning how to cook from her mother as a child in Santiago del Estero, her career “start” at Primitiva, her first cooking classes at Le Cordon Bleu, her decision to publish El libro de Doña Petrona in 1934 at the behest of her fans, her successful radio and then television programs with Juanita at her side, and her commitment to making herself accessible to fans by publicly sharing her phone number and personally responding to their numerous letters. Over the course of her long career, Doña Petrona became a widely recognized symbol of the idea that food, and especially women’s daily acts of cooking, served to link people across the nation. In her memoirs, she recalled her immense satisfaction in imagining how families’ lunches and dinners across Argentina had been inspired by her recipes. She explained that the thousands of letters from amas de casa together with media reports about her popularity had led her to consider herself “part of an immense family made up of thousands of sisters of all ages.”4 Despite many of her contemporaries’ interest in joining this “sisterhood” of amas de casa, the women to whom she directed her advice have since been overlooked by scholars. This is remarkable, given the importance that fellow Argentines put on women’s domestic roles and on food and the unprecedented level of success achieved by Doña Petrona. Journalists frequently compared her to other Argentine greats, like tango singer Carlos 220 Conclusion Gardel. Some were amazed to recognize that Argentines had apparently consulted her best-selling cookbook “much more than the Bible.”5 The Argentine National Library reported that El libro de Doña Petrona was the most frequently stolen book in its collection and moved it to the sala de tesoros (rare book room) with other precious texts.6 As we have seen, this was all backed up by impressive sales figures. Over the course of the twentieth century, El libro de Doña Petrona sold over 3 million copies and its author established herself at the center of Argentine domesticity.7 Here she was joined and buoyed by her assistant, Juanita Bordoy. When Juanita Bordoy passed away in 1995, the major newspapers eulogized “Doña Petrona’s legendary assistant” who had become the “archetype of the domestic servant in Argentina” and who, only now, at the time of her death, could “recover her full name.”8 Still, as was the case during her career, even today Juana Bordoy continues to be referred to as “Juanita.” In fact, at a party in Michigan in 2006, an Argentine expat in her twenties responded to a request from her husband to get him something, “What do you think? That I’m your Juanita?!” And, as had happened so many times before, the discussion, now among a group of Argentines, most of whom were too young to have seen Doña Petrona and Juanita live on television, turned to a critique of Doña Petrona’s treatment of her assistant.9 During the 1990s, a number of newspaper articles mentioned another critique of Doña Petrona that continued to resonate during this era—that her recipes were too expensive for many Argentines to prepare.10 In the last years of Petrona’s life, Argentines had endured increasingly dramatic bouts of inflation coupled with declining salaries and rising prices. During the 1990s, under President Carlos Saúl Menem (1989–99), economic liberalization policies allowed better-off Argentines to consume new products and travel abroad, while austerity measures contributed to an unprecedented level of poverty in Argentina...

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