¿quien puede comer en esta casa? Rambling Tongue in Buenos Aires

On 8th May 2010 poet, journalist and food artist Michelle Rambler opened Rambling Restaurant’s doors for the first time in South America. Back in March this year, on a quest to discover more about her Latino roots, Michelle upped sticks and set up camp in Buenos Aires. She has been artist in residence at Argentine artist Lucrecia Urbano’s studio in San Ferdando, a leafy suburb north of the city which is home to chocolate factories, farms and one of Buenos Aires’ largest villas miserias, La Cava.

Michelle writes…

Lucrecia set up a residency program alongside her studio in 2008 and has since invited along artists from as far afield as Jordan, the US and Spain to stamp their own unique print on the house and get involved with teaching art to the kids of the neighbourhood. I decided to play on the project’s name “Quien puede vivir en esta casa?” (Who lives in a house like this?) and call this Rambling outing “Quien Puede Comer en Esta Casa?” (who eats in a house like this?)

Breakfast in Buenos Aires is usually a rather low-key affair, with most portenos sipping on a fortifying cafe solo and a tostado before heading out to face the city’s ten-lane highways and whistling collectivos. Lucrecia and the other artists at the studio were thus a little shocked at the lavish and rapt description I gave of a full English breakfast as I pined for one after a heavy night on fernet branca and coke, the chosen tipple of the younger generation of Argentines. Lucrecia et al remaining doggedly unconvinced that so much fried food could ever constitute a pleasurable meal, I decided to make a mini English breakfast as a starter to prove that morcilla, Argentine black pudding, is perfectly palatable before 9pm.

I dragged my Australian friend Zoe out to San Fernando to help out with the muffin marathon…

…and was delighted to find quail eggs at the local market. Bacon not being a cut of meat you’ll find at the butchers over here, we had to use jamon crudo as a substitute, which we folded into delicate salty blush curls over buttery garlic mushrooms and topped off with a slice of morcilla and a fried quail egg.

Expert asador Andres lovingly cooked mountains of harissa beef and tumeric chicken kebabs on the six-foot long parrilla. It takes a full-blooded Argentine to really know which of the myriad different cuts of beef you are faced with at the butcher’s you should use for kebabs (the Argentines are very particular about their meat, be warned). Luckily Flor, who works with Lucrecia, had a friend in the countryside she could call up. Ten kilos of succulent carmine beef arrived in a bloody sack Friday morning and was served saturday with roasted aubergine and enormous bowlfuls of roof-tossed salad.

Argentines are crazy about ice-cream. On every major road you’ll find at least one heladeria, each boasting its own home-made version of Argentina’s favourite flavour, dulce de leche. For the uninitiated, dulce de leche is a sweet, sticky caramel spread, used liberally in just about every argentine cake or dessert. The supermarkets here stock a truly eye-boggling range of the stuff, but if Argentina sounds like a bit of a trek for a tub of toffee, you can make it quite easily by boiling a can of unopened condensed milk for an hour or so. Be careful not to overboil, explosions can happen. I’m also crazy about ice-cream but wanted to veer away from the obvious and when Lucrecia appeared at my door with a couple of cans of gloriously rich Canadian maple syrup asking if i had any idea what to use them for, I decided to have a crack at making a slightly different helado artesanal for Rambling Tongue.

Lucrecia donated not only the maple syrup but sacks of walnuts from her family farm in Cordoba, which took a while to crack and toast, but made a stonkingly good praline…

I mixed all the praline up with the maple syrup ice-cream base with some trepidation as I’d made the recipe up and it’s risky trying out an unproven recipe on 40 dinner guests. Using only cream and no milk meant that there was no risk of ice crystals forming and it turned out beautifully.

Being an artist in residence in a fairly remote suburb where you are advised not to go out at night because you may well get raped or shot (I doubt this to be true, I think it’s just the Argentine sense of drama and inclination to paranoia which feeds such claims), can make for dull nights. I amused myself by stencilling 80 small chocolate men to finish off the dessert.

I’d come across the idea for making a ridiculous number of edible houses after partaking in Maritea Daehlin Sitchet-Kanda’s brilliant installation at the Market Estate Project in Camden back in March. Maritea is a fellow Latino-Scandie and knows a lot about gingerbread, most importantly that cream is an essential addition to a good dough. Every other gingerbread recipe I have attempted has resulted in poor architectural material, but Maritea’s recipe results in a truly delicious and durable biscuit.

I baked happily.

I’d been working with the children from the area for the past few weeks, taking pictures to document their classes and generally providing much amusement with my half baked Spanish and buckets of home-made popcorn, the latter used for the most part as ammunition in frenzied food fights held across the yard. We invited them all along to ritually destroy the gingerbread model of the house I made.

House destroyed, everyone poured into the ceramic studio for poetry from Buenos Aires poet Juan Salzano, Los Angeles poet JC Sullivan, author, poet, singer and all-round inspiration Gabriela Bejerman and me.

See here for more photos. We’ll be back in BA for more Rambling adventures on the first Saturdays of June and July.