This is Argentine Food

Credit must be given where credit is due. And today's post on Idle Words, with the intriguing title of Argentina On Two Steaks A Day, deserves it. There is a special balance between seeing things freshly, with the eyes of the just-arrived, and explaining them incisively enough to avoid cliche ("Wow, there's a lot of meat here!"). Idle Words' hocho, oil painter Maciej Cegłowski, hits all the notes on Argentine food, with the right shade of comic explanation, and is, well, right. Being that Argentine food evolves glacially, nothing else may need be said about the basics for many a year. A few samples:

The classic begginer's mistake in Argentina is to neglect the first steak of the day. You will be tempted to just peck at it or even skip it altogether, rationalizing that you need to save yourself for the much larger steak later that night. But this is a false economy, like refusing to drink water in the early parts of a marathon. That first steak has to get you through the afternoon and half the night, until the restaurants begin to open at ten; the first steak is what primes your system to digest large quantities of animal protein, and it's the first steak that buffers the sudden sugar rush of your afternoon ice cream cone.

but, beware

Dulce de leche is a culinary cry for help. It says "save us, we are baffled and alone in the kitchen, we don't know what to do for dessert and we're going to boil condensed milk and sugar together until help arrives". This cloying dessert tar is so impossibly sweet that you wish you were ten years old again, just so you could actually enjoy it. It is everywhere.

and, finally, on mate

Mate aficionados will tell you that mate contains a special compound, mateine, that serves as a tonic and mild stimulant, promoting alertness without making it hard to sleep, reducing fatigue and appetite, helping the digestion and serving as a mild diuretic. Scientists will tell you that mateine bears a suspicious resemblance to a chemical called caffeine. Mate aficionados will then grow indignant, explaining that mateine is really a stereoisomer (mirror image) of caffeine, with different effects, which will in turn irritate the scientists, who will snap that caffeine doesn't have a chiral center, so it can't have a distinguishable mirror image, and why don't the mate aficionados just put a sock in it.

Just go read it.