My host brother Fede taught me that phrase the other day after we finished off lunch with some fruit salad and dulce de leche. Woof. That stuff is muy rico.
Besides speaking an entirely different language, Argentinos
have an entirely different culture when it comes to eating.
I’ve been here a little over a week, and I’ve divested myself
of any hope of real breakfast. There are no pancakes or omelets or bowls of
cereal to be found. This was breakfast this morning. For everyone.
Okay, I confess. I ate two pieces before I took the picture.
You can eat your miniature toast with butter or honey.
The saving part of
breakfast though, is that we have mate cocido, which is what’s in the mug. It’s
yerba mate (a super traditional and popular drink in certain parts of Latin
America), but instead of drinking it out of a mate gourd like this…
…you brew it on the stove with yuyos (extra herbs - like
mint, orange peel, peperina (a common herb that grows in the sierras)), strain
it, and drink it out of a mug. It’s muy deliciosa.
In Argentina, lunch is the meal to look forward to. It’s the
biggest meal of the day, and we eat around 2:30. There’s always some sort of
meat, but not as much as I thought there would be. The way everyone talked
about Argentina, I imagined that I was never going to see anything green for
three months and that every meal would be mostly carne y pollo (beef and
chicken). But I’ve had a few vegetables here and there. And las ensaladas de
frutas (fruit salad) are muy popular aca.
Dinner isn’t usually until 10pm and it’s a lot smaller. I
was pretty nervous about that at first, because normally my stomach’s usually
pretty ready to eat around 6. But every day in the early evening, someone inevitably brings out a mate gourd and there’s some sort of pastry or something to eat.
Speaking of pastries, that’s another part of Argentina I’m going to
miss when I leave. There are panaderias everywhere. They’re little
bakeries that sell all sorts of different kinds of breads and pastries. It’s
normal to hit up the panaderia every day for a snack. So much butter and sugar. En los productos de
las panaderías, en el mate… en todo.
So for all my complaining about not eating much breakfast,
the way we eat here is actually pretty great. If I’m really hungry between
breakfast and lunch, I can just get a couple facturas at the panaderia for 7
pesos (less than a dollar) to tide me over. And going to bed with a full
stomach is pretty wonderful.
In addition to pastries and mate, there are a lot of sweets
specific to Argentina. My favorite so far are golocinas (candy/cookie) called colaciones.
They’re especially popular in Cordoba (at least I think that’s what my host mom
said), and they’re super sugary and filled with dulce de leche. So so good.
And alfajores. They’re sandwich-style cookies with some sort
of filling between the layers of cookie and usually coated in something. They’re
sold everywhere. Even in the pharmacy my host family works at:
There's also just a lot of candies I've never heard of. Today I tried what's called a "media hora," which translated means "half an hour." It's a small hard candy that supposedly lasts half an hour. It was licorice flavored and tasted terrible, but you can't just spit out a candy that lasts half an hour. It's like the closest real-life thing to Willy Wonka's Everlasting Gobstopper. But I timed it, and it only lasted fifiteen minutes. I feel betrayed.
Me, after 15 minutes of sucking on licorice:
Anywho, that’s Argentina from my stomach’s point of view. I’m
currently accumulating a list of other fun, hilarious, weird, scary, and fascinating
cultural differences. I’ll get around to blogging about that eventually.
For now, I’ll leave you with this fun fact: milk in
Argentina comes in a bag (un sachet). It’s like those milk pouches from
elementary school. Except bigger and without a pointy straw.
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