CULINARY CONTRIBUTION OF IMMIGRANT CULTURES

From the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the immigrant population that settled in Santiago del Estero had an important level of integration. It produced a remarkable cultural enrichment by incorporating features of the traditional heritage of their homelands, such as its richness and culinary variety with its recipes, aromas and flavours.

The preparation and family consumption of food constituted the language through which the communities  expressed their affective ways of being and without distancing themselves completely from the motherland of each nation. With a strong symbolic charge of daily bread, these foods provided, with the caloric value of their diets, the formation of their taste, their sensation of satiety, their enjoyment.

These typical dishes, a conscious construction of the everyday, have influenced native gastronomy. Today they are festive meals of dynamic production, which generate spaces of individual and collective transcendence, where the ancestral does not remain immobile, but is re-signified each time the tradition is updated. As a heritage moulded to the pre-existing cultural evolution, today they are part of the local identity.