Maria Eugenia and I finally figured out a time that works for Rodrigo, her partner in the El Caldero aboriginal cooking school, and for Nico, Lucas and me. We set a meeting for 10:30 a.m. this morning at the school, which is on the far edge of Buenos Aires proper.
What an amazing treat! Maria greeted us at the door with hugs and the traditional Argentine peck on the cheek, then ushered us inside to a riot of wonderful aromas emanating from the kitchen. Her business partner and philosophical kindred spirit Rodrigo is equally fascinating and graciously hospitable. He lives in the other half of the building in which the school is located.
Maria is German heritage with a long Argentine family history. Rodrigo has dual nationality in Argentina and Chile, his birth home, while his family traces their roots to Lebanon. What is America? Maria and Rodrigo give us a unique set of answers with simple biography.
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At the moment, Nico, Lucas and I are focused on the source of the wonderful aromas wafting through the kitchen and into the open roofed atrium!
We of course had not eaten, and after our introductions, Maria took us into the cozy, professional looking kitchen and started pulling big trays full of delicious muffins out of the large commercial oven, while Rodrigo prepared a red corn juice and other breads and cakes for our breakfast meeting.
We ate and talked and drank for about 90 minutes, then Lucas did some preliminary filming to test the natural light and acoustics in the kitchen. We agreed to start working on an outline, a budget, a list of ingredients and a list of equipment to shoot several episodes in a single dawn-to-dusk day of filming as soon as we could all agree on a date. We hope to begin production filming within the next 30 to 45 days. Nico thinks we will need a two camera set up and is already working on a list of equipment.
The slideshow presented here of this wonderful day shows a red corn juice that was crisp, refreshing and delicious. It shows papaya jam, a variety of corn whose origins date back over 600 years, delicious muffins made from this legacy corn that were so heavy and moist and filling, one or two was all you could eat, even though you wanted more because the taste was so exquisite. Algorroba, an incredible ancient sweetener from a form of mesquite, was used in the cake and can also be used to sweeten maté or tea or coffee. There is no sugar high or blood sugar spike with this delicious, natural and super low hypo-glycemic index sweetener. It is almost a travesty to call it a sweetener. It is more of an enhancer, with a slightly nutty, very faintly chocolatey taste. Nico and I both asked for bags of algorroba to take home with us.
One last note. Both Maria Eugenia and Rodrigo are excited about the idea of our filming their work, but they are also very cautious. They want the old ways of thinking about food, the philosophy of our relationship to the earth, to be shared more widely. They want more people to know that there are still many of the old ingredients available. But they do not want a media circus. This is not a celebrity chef show. There is a unique philosophy to be shared, and behind this knowledge lies a sizable network of contacts and sources in remote areas that neither Maria nor Rodrigo wants disturbed. Indeed, many of their contacts would not like the idea of such a filmed show at all and would be unlikely to talk with us, and if they were to be bothered by strangers, it would damage long standing relationships.
We are trying to balance this desire to share valuable knowledge with a wider audience with an equally strong desire by all involved to ensure respect for privacy and the fragility of social settings in which people still nurture and practice these ideas in their daily life. We are all willing to make the effort to balance these two competing claims because in a world of manipulated shortages and mass produced foods that are bad for our health and bad for our environment, this window into our ancestral heritage is needed now more than ever.
