It’s comforting to know that Illinois has some serious competition in the wacky governor sweepstakes. I feel like the folks my husband, Peter, and I met in last January in Louisiana.
Whenever anyone realized we were from Illinois, they’d say something like “We really have to thank you. For years we’ve been embarrassed by Louisiana’s corrupt politics, but y’all have taken the heat off us.” Of course, South Carolina governor Mark Sanford’s amorous adventures don’t fall into the category of prosecutable offenses, although skipping the country for Argentina without giving anyone in the state government (or his family) the means to contact him, and misleading them about his whereabouts, surely constitute a dereliction of duty. On the other hand, many Illinoisans would have been all too happy to have Blago take a hike, or at least disappear off of the radar screen.
Like our late, unlamented governor, Sanford doesn’t seem to know when to shut up, providing endless fodder for late night comedians. As South Carolina Episcopalian priest Phillip Linder said on The Daily Show, “Many of us are praying that he goes into a more silent mode.” Reverend, we in Illinois can truly empathize with you in ways those in other states can’t. Sanford’s romantic rendezvous and tearful soul-searching probably left him little opportunity to savor Argentine food. That’s a shame, because Argentina is home to a world-class food scene. Argentina is beef country.
It has the highest per capita beef consumption in the world — almost double that of the U.S. Although the Andes mountains tower over its western region, the vast majority of Argentina consists of rich grassy lowlands, called pampas, that are perfect for cattle. Argentine grass-fed beef is not just consumed domestically, it is a major export.
The pampas are home to vast cattle ranches. Gauchos, Argentine cowboys, still roam the plains. The pampas are said to be similar to the American West of a century ago. The cuisine of Argentina is a rich amalgam of influences from native Incas, the early Spanish settlers, and a huge wave of immigrants who arrived in the late 1800s — almost a million in the decade between 1880 and 1890 alone. Some were Jewish, German, English, Welsh and more Spanish. But the biggest influx came from Italy; natives of Buenos Aires even speak Spanish with an Italian accent. In fact, Argentine cuisine has been more influenced by Italy’s cuisine than even Spain’s.
My introduction to Argentine food happened in a place almost as incongruous as the Appalachian Trail: Amsterdam. Years ago Peter and I had spent a spring week there, bicycling through the bulb fields, and wandering along the canals. We ate traditional Dutch herring, pizza topped with creamy yellow Gouda, and discovered Indonesian ristaffel, a mound of saffron-tinted rice served with numerous small dishes of spicy meat and vegetable preparations (Indonesia was once a Dutch colony).
One early evening we stumbled into a used record store and were transported from an old European city into 1950s America.
The clerk sported a classic flat top haircut; he could have been on the set of Happy Days. The records were classics from the ’50s and ’60s, too, and we spent so long looking through them and talking to the clerk, that we didn’t realize it had grown quite late. We were hungry; could our new friend recommend someplace nearby? Sure, he replied enthusiastically, there was an Argentine restaurant just a few blocks away. Cool, we
