Creating a Common Table in Twentieth-Century Argentina: Doña Petrona, Women, and Food

Abstract

Rebekah Pite's book is a well-done and original examination of the culture of food consumption and the role of women in Argentine society in the twentieth century. It is primarily focused on Buenos Aires and other urban areas. What makes this book different and entertaining is the way that it approaches the topic. The author uses the life, and especially the career, of the iconic figure Petrona C. de Gandulfo (better known as Doña Petrona) to examine the changing role of food, food consumption, cooking, and women (especially of the middle classes) between the 1930s and the 1990s. This was a period of rapid change in technology. It saw the introduction of gas and electric stoves and refrigerators, as well as many more processed foods. It also saw the rapid change in what were considered acceptable activities for middle-class women, especially after marriage. In addition, the society underwent frequent sharp economic crises that presented severe problems for the consumer, which changed food consumption patterns.Doña Petrona was born probably in 1896 and died in 1992. Although provincial born and raised, she was professionally active in the city of Buenos Aires. Despite claiming throughout most of her life that the ideal role for women was as a housewife (she did partially adjust to the changing ideas of the times toward the end of her life), she was amazingly entrepreneurial and successful in her commercial activities. She went from demonstrating the uses of gas stoves for a British-owned gas company as part of a sales campaign to writing cooking columns in women's magazines and to hosting a radio show. What made her an iconic figure, however, was her cookbook, which is undoubtedly one of the best-selling books in the history of Argentina. One of the things that Pite has done is show how the cookbook changed over time and how in large part this reflected the changes that the society was undergoing. Later Doña Petrona also became a television personality by demonstrating recipes on the screen. Clearly she was an entrepreneurial figure of great ability who adapted well to changing times but also understood, perhaps instinctively, what would sell. Doña Petrona's cookbooks included both Argentinizations of European recipes and Argentine ones such as empanadas. (In my house we often make empanadas using a 1960 edition of the book.) In a society that was attempting to adjust to the large-scale presence of immigrants and their children, a cookbook that laid out what was Argentine cooking but that included the familiar as well as the new probably seemed particularly appealing.Pite does a good job of discussing how Doña Petrona needed to adjust (only partially successfully) to a world in which increasingly more women worked and felt that the complex preparation of food was unattractive, if not impossible. The author successfully places Doña Petrona in the complex shifting social norms and economic conditions. However, I wonder whether the size of kitchens in many of the middle-class apartments built in the last half century or so contributed to the trend of moving away from making more complex recipes. Many kitchens have so little space that it is difficult, if not impossible, to do complex cooking.While most of Pite's observations are judicious, at times she seems to strain too hard to draw conclusions based on the experience of one figure, even if an iconic figure. Individuals are after all individuals and not representatives of a society. Clearly Doña Petrona was exceptional in her entrepreneurship and in the fact that she was truly a self-made woman, moving from strained circumstances to a great deal of wealth. Probably more important is that while the author rightly tries to tie the text to the politics of the era, in places her command of the details is weaker than it should be. An example is that the author has Doña Petrona having tea with the wife of General Pedro Ramírez in the presidential residence in 1955 (obviously erroneous) after the overthrow of Juan Domingo Perón as an indication of Doña Petrona's possible anti-Peronism. Ramírez was president in 1943 and 1944, and having tea with his wife may have indicated support for the military regime that allowed Perón to build his popularity.Despite these relatively minor caveats, Pite has given us an entertaining and informative book that tells us a great deal about the nature of food consumption and the role of women in its preparation during decades of rapid change, of “modernization” but also of increasing economic crisis. It also tells us a great deal about the changing status of women and of the middle class. It is a book very much worth reading.