Who Owns Pasta?

Doña Tonita steps out of the kitchen and into the cozy, wood-paneled dining room of her restaurant to welcome me. She leans on a dark-blue melamine table that resembles a starry sky. Through the window, the Andean hills loom as the sun sets, painting the sky in shades of rose and copper.

'Today,' she says softly while tousling her short curls, 'we have beef empanadas and Swiss chard canelones with bolognese and white sauce.'

I find myself in Belén, a town in northwest Argentina's Catamarca province, influenced by ancient Indigenous cultures. Just a short drive away are the Shincal ruins, an Incan outpost from the 15th century, and the colonial town of Londres, a key battleground during the Calchaquí Wars between the native Diaguita people and Spanish colonizers. The residents of Belén and nearby areas are mainly Criollo, with mixed Indigenous, Spanish, African, Arab, and Western European roots.

On weekends, like many local women, Doña Tonita makes mote, a traditional stew of meat, hominy, and beans that was once prepared during community harvests. Today, it’s a beloved dish for Saturday family gatherings. However, she notes, 'During the week, people eat what everyone eats: milanesa, ñoquis, noodles, and stuffed pasta.'

The Italian names for Doña Tonita’s dishes—canelones for cannelloni, ravioles for ravioli, ñoquis for gnocchi—might suggest they are purely Italian creations. However, these flavors are deeply rooted in Belén’s rich culinary history. Just take a whiff of her bolognesa. Like her crispy empanadas, the sauce is fragrant with paprika, or pimentón, crafted from red peppers grown, dried, and ground into powder each year in the valleys near Belén. At another Mytoury down the street, servers carry plates of potato ñoquis alongside jigote, a hearty potato and beef casserole. While their origins differ, both dishes are blanketed in generous amounts of cheese, with the jigote smothered in mozzarella and the ñoquis swimming in a rich four-cheese sauce.

Argentina is often portrayed as a European nation adrift in Latin America, and there is some truth to this perspective. When Buenos Aires, constructed with imported materials in the style of Paris, became the seat of government in 1880, it was built on the foundation of over fifty years of mass immigration, predominantly from Italy. Today, the exact percentage of Argentines with Italian heritage is unclear; estimates suggest that between 50 to 70 percent of Argentines have some Italian ancestry (in comparison to 60 percent with Indigenous heritage, according to a comprehensive genetic census from 2005).

Across the nation, traditional bodegones with white tablecloths serve a blend of dishes with European roots, reminiscent of a page from a 1970s Cordon Bleu magazine. It’s common to find tables adorned with gambas al ajillo, noodles in creamy leek sauce, and pork with plum sauce alongside mashed potatoes. The influence of Italian immigrants on Argentine cuisine is unmistakable: pizza, pasta, and milanesa have become essential staples in homes and restaurants alike.

However, many people mistakenly believe that these enduring culinary influences suggest Argentina's cuisine never developed its own identity, or that it shouldn't. In a 2021 piece for the Argentinian newspaper Infobae titled “Is Italian Food in Argentina just a Criollo Illusion?” Italian journalist Nunzia Locatelli states, “In Argentina, Italian cuisine remains tied to the memory of a plump grandmother who rises at dawn to prepare ragú (tuco) or make pasta.” For Locatelli, anything not crafted by a nonna recreating recipes precisely as they are made 7,000 miles away is seen as a deviation from Italian culinary traditions. She argues that “Pine nuts are essential for a proper pesto,” adhering to European culinary dogma, despite many Argentinian chefs opting for local almonds and walnuts, which are significantly cheaper. Locatelli presents a picture of an immigrant yearning for home, unable to fully embrace the country that has welcomed them.

This type of broad, simplistic narrative—often echoed in international discussions of Argentine food, such as in an episode of Somebody Feed Phil, where host Phil Rosenthal describes Buenos Aires as a city of Italians and Spaniards before dining at one of the city’s rare traditional Italian trattorias—maintains a vague, Eurocentric definition of authenticity. What must occur to acknowledge how Italian immigrants integrated their food culture into Argentina’s culinary landscape, and how diners from all backgrounds have adapted Italian methods and ideas to nourish themselves? At what point does food in any diaspora, separated from its origins, become “authentic” to another culture?

In the 1990s, notable editor and restaurant critic Fernando Vidal Buzzi, who reported on Buenos Aires dining from the mid-1970s until his passing in 2013, began to articulate the concept of “tipo Italiana,” describing a food culture in Argentina that is not Italian, but rather Italian-inspired.

“A tomato varies in character from place to place, just as flour does,” he wrote. “The renowned milanesa a la napolitana is a completely porteño [Buenos Aires] invention. The mere notion of a milanesa napolitana would cause a nervous breakdown for anyone from the city of Duomo. How could anyone entertain the idea of creating such a distortion of culinary terminology, undermining all regional Italian culinary traditions?”

During Buzzi’s era, the dining landscape was upscale. Restaurant culture turned its gaze away from Latin America to revere Europe. He played a pivotal role in acknowledging that Argentinian cuisine had forged its own identity. According to Buzzi, pasta and its variations represented nostalgia embraced by the masses—including immigrants from diverse backgrounds—until they were fully incorporated into Argentine culture.

The typical narrative of diasporic food evolution suggests that homesick immigrants recreate the flavors of their homeland using local ingredients. However, “home” is just one aspect of immigration; the other involves adapting to a new environment. The realities of a new life shape the nostalgia for the past.

At the dawn of the 20th century, Argentina was among the richest nations globally. Like the U.S., it was promoted as a land of opportunity for immigrants from across Western and Eastern Europe, East Asia, the Levant, and the Caucasus. However, these newcomers faced a country governed by an elite that hoarded wealth and opportunities, grappling with an economy that suffered from relentless inflation, which spiraled out of control in the 1940s and persisted. Since 1944, the average annual inflation rate has hovered around 190 percent, peaking at an astonishing 20,000 percent in 1989. Economic instability is an enduring reality in Argentina, where the only certainty is change. People often remark that one could leave for 20 years and return to find everything transformed yet familiar.

Milanesa a la napolitana epitomizes cooking in this context. The dish originated in the 1930s or ’40s when a chef, having burned a milanesa, cleverly masked the mistake with ham, tomato, and cheese. This backstory reflects more than just a busy cook's blunder; it symbolizes the shared creativity amid chaos that defines Argentinidad. Just as the cook couldn't bear to waste a piece of breaded beef, Argentinian Italian cuisine embodies the resilience of many cultures drawing from their heritage to navigate challenging circumstances. This collective ingenuity is validated when diners recognize that milanesa a la napolitana is distinctly Argentine.

Italian-ish recipes exist on a spectrum, varying in distance from their Italian originals. Some involve simple ingredient swaps, like using affordable local almonds in pesto. Others have evolved into unique cultural staples, such as fideos con tuco—a budget-friendly meal requiring only a bag of noodles, a box of tomato sauce, and a few pantry items—making it nearly impossible to mention one without the other. Further along the spectrum are the oversized stuffed ham and cheese sorrentinos created by the Vespoli family to distinguish their restaurant among the many pasta establishments. Finally, there are dishes that only loosely resemble traditional Italian cuisine.

'Many dishes may seem Italian at first glance, but aside from their shape, they have little connection to true Italian cuisine,' remarks Carina Perticone, a local historian and food expert. She highlights canelones de humita, which transforms a pre-Hispanic corn dish found throughout the Andes. Instead of using the original corn paste wrapped in husks, fresh corn kernels are blended with pumpkin and rolled into canelone shells, often topped with melted cheese or a creamy white sauce. This dish adopts an Italian format but is wholly infused with Argentine spirit: chaotic, confident, and resourceful.

'The pasta we enjoy isn't Italian, and we have no reason to pretend otherwise,' Perticone asserts. 'It belongs to us.'

Today, immigrants from across Latin America, particularly from Paraguay and Peru, constitute nearly 80 percent of foreign residents in Argentina. Over the last decade, the Eurocentric culinary narrative has started to shift, allowing more chefs to showcase their interpretations of tipo Italiana. Buenos Aires was once the heart of European sentiment (separatists among Genovese immigrants in the La Boca neighborhood even tried to break away and join the Italian Crown in 1882), yet few Italian restaurants remain today—however, there are numerous places serving Argentinian Italian fare.

Even in establishments with strong Italian roots, the adaptable cuisine illustrates how Italian dishes have been reimagined and reinvented in Argentina. 'My grandmother Maria lived in the restaurant; her bedroom is now the administrative office,' shares Rosario Ranieri, third-generation owner of Spiagge di Napoli, a nearly century-old pasta restaurant in Boedo. 'We aren't even from Naples; we're from Peschici, which is on the Adriatic Sea. My grandparents thought people wouldn't visit a restaurant named Beaches of Peschici.' The restaurant is renowned for its hand-rolled fucciles, available by the kilo. Guests can also mix and match from a pasta menu designed like a bingo card, featuring 12 pasta types and 14 sauces. Dishes are often served with warm bread, plastic packets of cream cheese, heaps of grated parmesan, and wine bottles accompanied by soda siphons for making spritzes. 'We are a traditional Buenos Aires restaurant,' Ranieri states. 'Generosity defines us.'

In recent years, this culinary canon has started to evolve, especially in fabricas de pasta (the local term for fresh pasta shops) that are experimenting with traditional Italian pasta shapes at varying levels of 'authenticity.' Del Pratello boasts a fridge filled with offerings like caramelles stuffed with broccoli rabe and Tomme cheese, and tortellonis filled with panceta, potato, and sardo cheese. Mad Pasta hosts weekly pasta drops featuring dishes such as cappellaci with peas, mascarpone, and lime, or parsley cavatelli tossed with clams, gochujaru, and cured lemons.

Many young chefs are experimenting with Argentinian pasta shapes and traditions. Maria Antonieta Brignardello, a third-generation pasta-maker from the Mesopotamia region of Entre Rios in northeastern Argentina, runs a vegan pasta business called Potoca in Buenos Aires. Her potato ñoquis are especially popular and sell out every 29th of the month, in line with Argentinian folklore that encourages eating ñoqui with money under your plate for good fortune.

'To be honest, I didn’t learn about pasta from my Italian family,' Brignardello shares. 'It was from my mother's side. Her father was a Polish and German Jew, and my grandmother was part Criollo, part Syrian. They made pasta on demand, and later my mother opened a factory at our home that my brother now runs.' Brignardello fondly recalls meals of canelones filled with Swiss chard, hard-boiled eggs, beef, ricotta, and raviolones with cow brain and vegetables. She incorporates elements from these recipes into her pastas: pumpkin sorrentinos infused with turmeric in honor of her Syrian grandmother, and sauces enriched with onion and paprika, reminiscent of her German-Polish grandfather’s cooking. 'Perhaps Italians introduced the idea of pasta, but Argentinians transformed it into something unique,' she concludes.

Last year, I spent a chilly winter weekend at María Luísa’s home in San Salvador, where the best activities were playing cards, sipping beer, and cooking. In a kitchen no bigger than a small closet, Brignardello and her grandmother worked together to roll out dough using the family pasta maker to create mushroom-stuffed pasta, and rolled mashed potatoes and flour into a long cylinder to slice into ñoquis. Brignardello even taught her grandmother how to make the perfect egg-free dough (it all depends on the water temperature). Her brother popped into the kitchen from the neighboring pasta factory to deliver cardboard boxes filled with ham-and-cheese sorrentinos for the meat-loving Dinogos. Meanwhile, a pot of vibrant goulash simmered on the stove, sending steam into the crisp winter air.

We arranged the table, squeezing pots of food between plates and glasses of beer and soda as best we could, each item reflecting the unique personalities of those gathered around it. This scene mirrors what’s happening in homes throughout the nation, where families fill their tables with their own quirks and beloved pasta dishes.