Two very different pieces of travel writing loom large in “Cocina Confidential,” Stephen Metcalf’s foodie adventure story from our winter travel issue. The first, “The Return of Eva Perón” by V.S. Naipaul, was written more than 30 years ago, but it’s still talked about in more introspective quarters of the Argentine capital — and not always with affection. “To Naipaul,” Metcalf writes, “Argentina was less a country than a staging ground for absurdist public traumas that never add up to an actual history. From dictatorship to hyperinflation to, more recently, the currency crisis, which plunged the economy into chaos in 2001, cataclysm seems to come naturally to Argentines.”
The second book is about places that function as a kind of Zoloft for the national anxiety that Naipaul describes, chicken soup for an Argentine soul addled by one too many public traumas. Well, maybe not chicken soup. More like cow intestines, fried squid rings that Metcalf says “melt in your mouth like buttery lozenges,” and ultra-quaffable malbec. The sacred place where these things are served up in unholy proportions is called the bodegón. It is the subject of Metcalf’s story and is also the subject of “Bodegónes de Buenos Aires,” a definitive guide to these repositories of Argentine heartiness, written by the Italian-born, Buenos Aires-based food critic Pietro Sorba. “When you are in a bodegón, you feel like you are in Buenos Aires,” he tells Metcalf. “You breathe its history. Its real history. The eternal Buenos Aires.”
Source:nytimes.com
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