Mil fÓrmulas de cocina “La Negra”: Labour, Gender, And Race In Argentina’s Meat Industry, 1917–1940

Abstract

This essay explores the interplay of race, gender, and class in early twentieth-century Argentina when major forces such as immigration, urbanisation, and modernisation reshaped women’s work both in the factory and the home. My analysis focuses on Mil fórmulas de cocina “La Negra”, a cookbook published between 1917 and 1940 by the meatpacking plant Compañía Sansinena de Carnes Congeladas, which features photographs from the factory and its workers in between the recipes. First, I refer to the history of the meatpacking plant and its modernisation campaign. I compare the case of “La Negra” to other stereotypes of Blackness in branding in order to explore the relationship between the company’s industrial project and the figure of the Afro-Argentine woman. Second, I examine the cookbook’s texts and images by tracing a parallel between the meatpacking plant’s female workers and the middle-class homemakers who buy and read these cookbooks. In so doing, I argue that La Negra’s cookbooks were a crucial instrument in reinforcing an ideology of domesticity that linked national progress to whiteness and middle-class identity.

Keywords:

• Argentina
• food studies
• race
• gender
• labour
• consumer culture

The disappearance of the Black population in Argentina is one of the country’s most enduring mysteries. Referring to this enigma and the place of the Afro-Argentines in the nation’s history, George Reid Andrews shows that, according to census data, toward the end of the eighteenth century, Black workers constituted almost 30% of the population. The number continually decreased throughout the nineteenth century, and by 1887, the Afro-Argentine population had descended dramatically to 1,8% (1989, 10). Despite the natural causes of this decrease, such as wars and the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1871, Reid Andrews points out that this disappearance forms part of a broader phenomenon, “which is the obfuscation, intentional or not, of the role of Afro-Argentines in the nation’s history” (1989, 12). Alongside this process, millions of European immigrants settled in Argentina in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a result, Buenos Aires “liberated” itself from its dependency on Black labourers, pushing this population to the margins of the city’s political and economic systems. This essay explores the relationship between race, gender, and labour in Argentina during the first decades of the twentieth century, when major forces such as immigration, urbanisation, and modernisation reshaped women’s work both in the factory and the home. In this essay, I explore the connection between a pre-twentieth-century history of Black female labour in Argentina and the role that emergent food industries, specifically the meat industry, played in the construction of the early twentieth-century fascination with efficiency, modernity, and whiteness. In this way, while so-called “barbaric” and “savage” races were relegated to lower racial and social hierarchical categories, Argentine politics and intellectuals made racial whiteness a central definition of Argentine identity (Alberto and Elena 2016, 2). This essay explores this dichotomy as well as the role of women, from homemakers to meat slaughterers, in the production and consumption of food.

Along with shoe, match, cigarette, and flour production, meat production served as one of Argentina’s economic pillars toward the end of the nineteenth century. In 1880, when industrial development in the country was still precarious, the first meat-processing plants, financed with British and US capital, began to grow. These plants allowed the supply of slaughtered meat to expand, creating an export-based market. Partly because of the international scope of this market, and partly due to its monumental architecture, meat-processing plants became the symbol of industrial modernity in Argentina. Their immense structures changed the shape of cities and delimited their borders. On the Riachuelo – the body of water that demarcates the southern limit of the city of Buenos Aires – four meat-processing plants were established: La Negra, La Blanca, Anglo, and Argentino (Silvestri 2004, 103). While the names Anglo and Argentino illustrate the competition between internal and external demands of food and capital in the Argentine meat trade, names like La Negra and La Blanca symbolise the contradictory forces behind the industry of animal slaughter: on the one hand the brutality of body killing and the barbarism of the slaughterhouses;¹ on the other, technological advances that made animal slaughter less bloody and more hygienic, at least to the public eye. The name La Blanca resonates with its monumental white building (a symbol of the modern industry), whereas La Negra recalls to the often-forgotten history of Black labour and animal slaughtering in a pre-modern era. Black and white slaughterhouses – facing each other on the opposite sides of the Riachuelo – that symbolise indirectly two racial and moral poles. In this essay, I will focus on the Compañía Sansinena de Carnes Congeladas, commonly known as La Negra, and the cultural history behind the cookbooks, Mil fórmulas de cocina “La Negra” that the company began to publish from the mid-1910s.² By showing the interdependence between the house and the factory, my analysis displaces cookbooks from the private realm in which they are usually confined in order to explore how these domestic objects are by no means apolitical.³

As part of her studies on violence against women, Rita Segato has strongly questioned the idea of domesticity as an isolated and marginal space for women. Segato points out that, alongside the formation of republican states, domestic space was divested of its own forms of politics and acquired the characteristics of “intimate and private” that it did not possess before (2016, 20). What Rita Segato aptly proposes is not so much women’s emancipation from the private to the public sphere but rather a re-politicisation of domestic space that would allow us to “take down the walls that encapsulate domestic spaces and restore the politics of the domestic proper to communal life” (2016, 106).⁴ Echoing Segato, in this essay, I resist the analytical separation between public (productive) and private (reproductive) spheres to theorise the interdependence of wage-work and household work.⁵

My objective here is to trace a parallel between the female workers of the meatpacking plants and the homemakers who read these cookbooks and consumed the meat slaughtered by other “women’s hands”.⁶ Hands that, until the 1930s, represented between 25% and 30% of all meat-processing plant workers, even reaching 50% in some sections, such as canning, packaging, and gutting (Lobato 1997). What these cookbooks show is how housework depends on factory labour (and the “products” of that labour) and, conversely, how factory work also depends on the reproductive labour of the home as a site of the production of the labour force. Indeed, housewives not only form part of this assembly line but also are its key workers since their labour, as Silvia Federici notes, “contributes to the production of the labor force and produces capital, thus enabling every other form of production to take place” (2012, 8). By stressing the concept of work and its social and economic implications, these cooking manuals question the limits of the public and private spheres as well as the role of women as participants in and producers of consumer culture.

Modernising La Negra

The first meat-processing plants founded in Argentina were erected over old saltery and slaughterhouse facilities. Partly for this reason, they remained structurally pre-modern factories anchored in what were the industrial beginnings of the nineteenth century. In the case of La Negra, its facilities used Juan Oliver’s old slaughterhouse and fat-rendering factory, which itself had been founded over Braulio Costa y Ezpeleta’s primitive saltery (Silvestri 2004,103). In 1885, the Frenchman Simón Gastón Sansinena converted the establishment into a meat-processing plant, la Compañía Sansinena de Carnes Congeladas, thanks to refrigeration technologies that expanded the possibilities of meat preservation. Due to the Baring crisis in 1890, La Compañía Sansinena became a limited company financed by British, French, and Argentine capital. It was then that it began remodelling and expanding its infrastructure. By the 1920s, the company possessed more than 30 refrigeration rooms, around 1,500 labourers, and private docks on the Riachuelo. In her description of La Negra’s plant in the 1920s, Graciela Silvestri pays special attention to the coexistence of new buildings of reinforced concrete alongside old and precarious wood buildings that came from the old-fat rendering plant. This superposition of architectural languages and materials is representative of the difficulty that La Negra had in achieving its modernisation. As Graciela Silvestri points out: “Despite the modernization effort, the government’s technical report on the possible acquisition of the facilities in 1923 is disheartening: the factory needed to be drastically renovated” (2004, 104). The factory’s modernisation developed clumsily and was never successfully achieved. This, in part, is what distinguishes La Negra from other “modern” meat-processing plants financed with US capital that opened in Argentina (like Swift and Armour). However, La Negra’s industrial deficiencies would be remedied with a careful publicity strategy that gave consumers an image of modernity that the factory, in reality, did not manifest. Part of the problem that La Negra and the other meat-processing plants would face was that, as an animal slaughtering industry that involved violent and bloody processes, it remained outside of the cities and outside of modern perception and sensoriality.⁷ Referring to another meat-processing plant located on the banks of the Riachuelo, Silvestri reflects, “La Blanca and its blood- and coal-stained walls pointed to a central problem: how could death be domesticated, how could it be mechanized, how, ultimately, could it be negated?” (2003, 238).

When Gaston Sansinena founded the meat-processing plant, he kept the name of the old facilities, the fat-rendering factory “La Negra Primitiva”, for his marketing campaign. This name relates to meat labour in preindustrial forms since Afro-Argentine women were associated, in Argentina, with the practice of animal slaughter (Pite 2016, 111; Lobato 2019, 38–39). In his costumbrista account of Afro-Argentines living in Buenos Aires during the Rosas era (1829–1852), Víctor Gálvez highlights the Black women workers who worked as washerwomen, ironers, seamstresses, cooks, and vendors. Among them, he mentions the so-called “achuradoras” “who took possession of the scraps of offal that the slaughterhouses abandoned, since they gathered the tallow from the intestines, the heads, the feet of the bovine animals (…). They were foul-smelling and dirty, those black women occupied the lowest rung of those of their race” (1883, 253). This disparaging description of the women who collected the waste from the slaughterhouses and who, like beasts, separated the useless from the useful, is repeated across other texts from this period. The Black achuradora symbolised barbarism in Esteban Echeverría’s El Matadero, written between 1838 and 1840 and published in 1871: “rummaging for guts (…) ready to devour whatever they found that was edible” (1990, 94). She is a woman-man, woman-beast who, as Víctor Gálvez mentions, is on the last rung of the social ladder. Why, then, choose her as the image of a “modern” meat-processing plant trying to distance itself from the savage slaughterhouses? The figure of La Negra refers, on the one hand, to its premodern past and, on the other, points to the present of the meat-processing plant and its interracial and intercultural workforce. I argue that La Negra, as a meat-processing plant, is the personification of a racialised technology and labour: the disparaging descriptions of the Black achuradoras of the nineteenth century would resonate, at the beginning of the twentieth, with those of the meat-processing workers, “foul-smelling and dirty” immigrants that, as the Afro-Argentines did in the nineteenth century, also worked with viscera and organ meat, no longer in the slaughterhouse corrals, but instead as labourers with planned and controlled productivity in the plant’s gutting section. Still, because of the physical and dire conditions of this labour and the association between slaughterhouses and violence, the story of the meatpacking plants is related to a culture of masculinity, where men dominated the high-skilled and better-paid occupations. Referring to the meatpacking community of Berisso, historian Daniel James points out that women were confined to inferior positions within the work process and rarely figure in the lore of the plants (1997, 46). In this way, it is no coincidence that animal slaughter was considered male territory but also associated with Afro-Argentine women. The figure of La Negra embodies the “other”. She is not the “angel of the house” but a degenerate hybrid: a lower-class working-woman, racially stigmatised, with masculine attributes, and ethically vulnerable.

Along with the emerging mass culture, various brands began to use stereotyped figures of Black men and women to identify and sell their products. While white women appeared as consumers and homemakers, Black women were depicted as domestic servants. In the United States, the origins of this racist iconography responded to a nostalgia for domestic servitude which went hand in hand with figures like the “mammy” or “mammie”, a naive image of a Black domestic servant to a white family that, with a smile on her face, took care of the kitchen and the family’s children. Eden Osucha refers to Aunt Jemima and the use of this racial stereotype in branding that recoded the system of slavery in emerging consumer markets, “in a burgeoning national ‘impulse to romanticize slavery’ through popular consumptions of antebellum fantasia” (2009, 81). This romanticised slavery is constructed through depictions of Black men and women represented as loyal and contented slaves with kind masters and nurturing mistresses. Likewise, the figure of Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima’s male counterpart, emerged in the 1940s as the face of a rice company. Represented as an elderly and servile Black man, Uncle Ben’s labour helped to perpetuate white suburban prosperity and happiness.⁸

In early twentieth-century Latin America, many corporations started using Black women in their advertisements. Referring to Argentina, Rebekah Pite mentions an early 1935 advertisement of the Tulipán brand butter that features Doña Clarida, a smiling Black woman with a servant uniform that recommends this product (2016, 112). A few decades later, in 1956, the brand of Argentina’s first self-rising flour, Blancaflor, started using the figure of a smiling Black cook with a chef’s hat, red apron, and white gloves. Throughout the twentieth century, different brands exploited these racial stereotypes to sell food and domestic commodities. A well-known example is “Negrita,” the iconic Peruvian brand of mazamorra morada (purple corn pudding) that, from the 1960s, promoted a ready-made mix with the image of a smiling Black woman with a kerchief. Like Jemima, Negrita not only represented culinary expertise but also symbolised an easy-to-make product that replaced Black servant labour in the kitchen.

As for La Negra’s iconography, its evolution over the decades reflects the idealisation and romanticisation of a trade that, around the end of the nineteenth century, was considered an unbecoming and dirty job, especially for women. The first logos represent La Negra as a mythological figure, not as the devouring beast that appears in El Matadero or Gálvez’s descriptions. Instead, she is a graceful nymph dressed in a Greco-roman style tunic who, together with a group of white women, holds up objects like teacups, scales, and pieces of meat. In other images, La Negra appears smiling with her chest uncovered and a tiara on her head, offering different products on an elegant silver tray. She is also represented as a “noble savage” half-naked along with animals in an idyllic and prosperous place (Figures 1 and 2). In the 1910s, the logo became a portrait in profile, which presented a mulata with her hair tied and a ring with the letter S for Sansinena hanging from her ear as a trademark. Over the years, the lines became more simple, and the colours saturated. From 1935 to the 1940s, her hair is covered with a red polka-dot patterned scarf, and her lips are enlarged and painted red. Her skin is darkened (Figures 3 and 4). The image no longer appears to be a realistic drawing, but a stereotypical caricature reproduced without variation. It does not precisely represent the “mammy” stereotype; she does not wear an apron, nor is she chubby. However, she, too, is a hybrid of Black labour and slavery, a “sanitised” version of the same violence exercised on the bodies of enslaved Black women in the past. La Negra’s logo is, in itself, a product of the intersection between racism and sexism (Crenshaw 1991)⁹: a young mulata, exotic and sexualised, who offers different products to consumers while her body is made to equal the rest of the commodity.¹⁰ Moreover, what these whiter-to-blacker portrays illustrate is that the racialization (and darkening) of Afro-Argentines overlaps with the making of Argentina as a homogeneously white country.

Figures 1 and 2. La Negra’s advertisements. Source: Mil Fórmulas de Cocina “La Negra” (1930).

Figures 3 and 4. Evolution of the iconography of La Negra. Source, from left to right: Mil Fórmulas de Cocina “La Negra” (1930) and Libro de Cocina (1940).

Figures 5–7. Front cover of La Negra’s cookbooks. Source, from left to right: Mil Fórmulas de Cocina “La Negra” (1924), Mil Fórmulas de Cocina “La Negra” (1935), and Libro de Cocina (1940).

Figure 8. Old clippings and a book dedication found in a used copy of Mil Fórmulas de Cocina “La Negra” (1930).

Throughout the years, the figure of “La Negra” becomes a distinctive aspect of the company’s profile: it appears as an immense logo on the façade of the Avellaneda factory, on the sides of delivery trucks, and on different products (meats, cold cuts, canned meats) that the company begins to sell in elegant retail stores. Her face also appears on the front cover of the company’s cookbooks (Figures 5–7). What these cookbooks and their changing covers represent is this transition between the “dark and barbaric” labour carried out in the slaughterhouses and their white bourgeois readers. At a time when the ideology of racial whitening played a critical role in the debates over Argentina’s nation-building process, these cookbooks sought to commodify and domesticate Blackness by reinscribing the stereotype of the animal-like achuradora and its negative associations with food within the values of the home and the family. By compiling a cookbook, Sansinena transformed La Negra into a domestic servant, expert in cooking, with the promise that white women wouldn’t have to spend time in the kitchen. As with Jemima, La Negra’s branding responded to a romanticisation of the forms of servitude that were a part of Argentine domesticity in the nineteenth century and that turned the figure of the Black cook into an “authority” for recommending a household product: “Donde la negra da la cara está la calidad” [When you see the Black woman’s face you know it’s good] reads one of the company’s ads as a sign of the product’s quality and authenticity.

Figure 9. Aerial view of the meat processing plant La Negra. Source: Mil Fórmulas de Cocina “La Negra” (1924).

Figure 10. La Negra’s chemical lab and a group of doctors conducting a bacteriological examination. Source: Mil Fórmulas de Cocina “La Negra” (1924).

Figure 11. La Negra’s Meat Cold Room. Source: Mil Fórmulas de Cocina “La Negra” (1924).

However, despite this marketing campaign, the insalubrity of La Negra’s facilities was an “open secret”. In 1928, the Italian professor Uberto Ferretti was invited by the Argentine government to advertise the workings of the Argentine meat industry to the potential Italian export market. In 1930, he published his notes and impressions of his trip to La Plata in the album L’Industria delle Carni in Argentina. When referring to the meatpacking plants La Negra and La Blanca he notes that the facilities are outdated and left much to be desired:

since where there is not abundant air, light and strictly modern equipment on the hygienic side, it is not possible to find that necessary characteristic in rooms where thousands of men and animals for about eight hours a day are piled up, I would say almost amalgamated, in the feverish performance of their work. (Ferretti 1930, 112–113)

Ferretti’s description of these slaughter rooms reveals a central issue in the discourses of this time: the fear of hybridisation, contagion, and contamination through contact between men and women, locals and immigrants, workers and animals. The Italian inspector identifies this issue as one of the principal dangers in La Negra’s dark and insalubrious space, where the bodies of people and animals, the dead and the living, can be found in disturbing proximity. The disorganisation and rupture of binaries that Ferretti observes with horrified eyes at the meat-processing plants is representative of the anxieties that this type of factory generated, in part due to the impossibility of imagining what happened on the inside. Although focused on domestic space, the cookbooks published by La Negra are in dialogue with what happens in the factory and the dangers the factory poses as a space of risk and a source of contagion (of both biological and “moral” diseases), where social, racial, and gender identities are blurred.¹¹

It is no coincidence that La Negra began publishing cooking manuals in the same year as the great meat strike of 1917 and 1918.¹² The repression of the workers’ movement was articulated from a hygienist standpoint that understood criminality as an evil that threatened social health and believed “anarchism” to be an ideological and moral disease of which the lower classes were guilty (Salessi 1995, 124). The question of workers’ activism is behind the publication of this recipe book, a domestic manual that sought to sanitise not only the home but also the meat-processing plant’s public image in the middle of a social and political crisis. As I will show, La Negra’s cookbook is tied to the slaughterhouse and within its pages it reimagines this controversial space in conveying it to its white middle-class audience. As Appadurai (1988), Neuhaus (2003), Humble (2005) and other food scholars have mentioned, the rise of a twentieth-century cookbook culture was tied to the shifts in middle-class life and identity.¹³ In this way, through a discourse focused on the “art of cooking” and its relationship to diet and national health, La Negra’s cookbooks were a crucial instrument not only in promoting domestic consumption, but also in reinforcing an ideology of domesticity that linked national progress to whiteness and middle-class identity.

A new art of cooking

I bought the 13th edition of Mil fórmulas de cocina “La Negra” from a second-hand bookstore in the city of Rosario. The book was dedicated: “To our dear friend Lydia with the greatest love. Adelia and María”. Among its pages, I found some clippings: two recipes cut from a “Sugar Cocoa” box and a medical prescription with a formula to make a home remedy using bicarbonate, tartaric acid, and flour (Figure 8). The material history of this used book may give us some hints about its readership. From the notes on its margins and its oily pages, we could speculate that this cookbook was commonly used in the kitchen. And by reading its dedication, we may also think of it as a valuable object for middle-class women, a suitable birthday gift.

The first twenty editions of Mil fórmulas de cocina “La Negra” published annually since 1917, were an overwhelming success, if we take the biased opinions of its preface. The company massively printed and marketed the book, selling 10,000 copies per year, every year for around 20 years. In the 7th edition of 1924, the company claims that there were already 70,000 copies circulating throughout the country, a statement that is repeated and updated in each new edition. But the unexpected success exceeded La Negra’s economic possibilities. From 1924 to the mid-1930s, La Negra no longer distributed the books for free but at a “cost price” of 1 Argentine peso, the price that probably these two friends, Adelia and María, had to pay for their gift. From 1917 to 1935, the book remains virtually unchanged, except for the colour of the cover. However, in 1940, the company introduced a new cookbook, the plainly titled Libro de cocina. A new (and possibly last) edition with the same recipes but a shift in its discourse and visuality.¹⁴

In tune with the image of “refinement” projected to its consumers, La Negra’s cookbook was not a flimsy pamphlet (like those that food companies usually distributed) but a carefully designed hardcover book.¹⁵ Because of the book’s materiality and cooking ingredients, La Negra’s cookbook was a luxury good. While frozen meat was in itself an expensive food, it required, in addition, that consumers own an electric refrigerator at home.¹⁶ From the early twentieth-century pre-Perón period to the late 1940s, the production and consumption of meat was a synonym of luxury and modernity related to the image of Argentina as an export economy. Natalia Milanesio has studied the shift between this period and the beginning of the Peronist administration that transformed the symbolic associations of beef consumption from a luxury to a right (2010, 90). Eduardo Elena has also pointed out that in the early Peronist era, meat was consumed daily in middle- and upper-class homes while working classes were able to include more meat in their meals thanks to their new consumer-spending power (2011, 88). In contrast, during the pre-Perón era, if a cookbook encouraged meat consumption, it was geared towards a very exclusive audience. Echoing the association between beef and luxury, Mil Fórmulas calls domestic cooking “culinary arts”. This label of distinction, which appeared in many twentieth-century cookbooks, separated pre-modern from modern ways of cooking from carbon and coal stoves to modern fuels like gas and electricity. La Negra’s cookbooks aimed to reeducate Argentine homemakers on how to use the stove and blenders and, especially, how to cook from processed and prepackaged foods. Moreover, the concept of culinary arts elevated the status of cooking from “dirty work” associated with domestic servants who had to “cook for a living” to a noble and distinguished practice considered suitable for middle-class women.

Along with the industrialisation of the food supply, the scientific discoveries of the day were applied to cooking. In this cookbook, scientific and aesthetic discourses overlap as ornamentation and artistry are subordinated to the medical objective of favouring digestion: “when the guests contemplate delicacies presented artistically, cooked perfectly, fragrant and pleasant to the eyes, they sense the enjoyment that they’ll derive from the dishes and feel a burning desire to digest them” (1924, 10). This association between art, science, aestheticisation and digestion indicates how domestic cooking finds, in scientific discourse, a new way to legitimise itself thanks to the value that both science and aesthetics confer on this minor practice, making it visible as something “new” in public space. This was part of a turn toward a domestic science revolution that applied scientific principles to cooking, making it more efficient and effective; in other words, more “modern”.¹⁷ In addition, industrial innovation in the household and the frozen food chain had a direct effect on the “language” of the recipes, with formal innovations such as the quantification and unification of measures and precision cooking times and temperatures (Giard 1998, 220). And although this book does not count or mention calories, it understands food through the lens of nutrition, considering eating not as a cultural or communal experience but as a medical and scientific issue. Indeed, the early part of the twentieth century witnessed the rise of interest in food from the perspective of calories, vitamins, and nutrients. As Nick Cullather explains, the calorie was not only a numerical indicator but a technology of classification that “had a part in an evolving developmental discourse that registered the requirements and aspirations of nations largely in numerical terms” (2007, 339).

In this way, the diet proposed by La Negra symbolised progress and development. The manual compiles a thousand sweet and savoury, vegetarian and meat, local and foreign recipes in alphabetical order. With a clean and scientific approach to cooking, the “formulas” use simple and concise language, and just like La Negra’s canned goods, the recipes have been reduced to a minimal form of expression. As an example, these are the instructions for “Masitas deliciosas” [Delicious cookies]: “Half a kilo of sugar, half a kilo of crushed almonds, two egg whites, beaten, and two unbeaten; mix all ingredients and put them in the oven in butter-greased tins” (1924, 155). The instructions are easy to follow as they, for the most part, draw on La Negra’s ready-to-use ingredients. Along with the emergence of consumer culture, La Negra redefines so-called “good cooking”: it’s not so much the ability to cook well but the ability to know how to choose good products and how to prepare them with “artistic and decorative talent”. Ornamental work was, in fact, fundamental in modern cooking because it allowed the housewife to hide the industrial nature of the products just as much as her lack of culinary knowledge¹⁸: “With a menu of LA NEGRA’S cold cuts and canned meats, you’ll save time and fuel, and make up for your ignorance of the culinary arts” (1924, 49), says one of the thousands of slogans scattered throughout the book’s recipes.

The book was an invitation to stay at home and eat homemade meals, depicting idyllic scenes like this one: “Gathered around a good table the serene brotherhood of the home blooms. Here family ties are affirmed, and souls are retempered for life’s struggles” (1924, 14). As I mentioned in the introduction, this type of discourse relies on the modern opposition between inside/outside and productive/unproductive labour that marginalised domestic space from the public sphere. However, I argue that La Negra’s cooking manuals do not isolate the domestic as space and concept. Instead, the book builds a narrative that connects housework with factory work and where housewives and factory workers are not antithetical figures but co-workers whose labour is connected within a capitalist mode of production. In the prologue, the housewife is described as a qualified employee, “clean, diligent, capable, foresighted, organised, accurate and gifted with good artistic taste” (1924, 8). And the home, by the same token, is described in the image and likeness of the factory: “The personal qualities that we have just enumerated alongside the raw materials and mechanical elements with which the food is prepared together constitute what is popularly known as good cooking” (1924, 8). The book insists on the cleanliness of both the housewife and of the food and speaks not so much of cooking as of “preparing” and “handling” food, employing a technical vocabulary that analogises the housewife’s labour to the Taylorized labour that the factory workers carry out. This representation of a domestic factory and an industrial home illustrates the circuit of capitalist production or what Silvia Federici calls the “social factory”,¹⁹ which begins in the kitchen, the bedroom, at home, “insofar as these were the centers for the production of labor-power – and from there it moved on to the factory, passing through the school, the office, the lab” (2012, 8).

These arguments are part of an long essay that precedes the recipes and brings together many of the turn-of-the-century anxieties around the epidemics and diseases that gripped Buenos Aires in the second half of the nineteenth century. In this prologue – a hygienist treatise – domestic cooking is framed in terms of science and nutrition. Concepts like “deglutition of the food” and “excito-secreting stomach nerves” defined this practice as a labour of public health. In this way, by preparing homemade meals, the homemaker would prevent “infectious diseases”, including vice and moral disorder:

Without good cooking there is no health, and without health the will cannot fulfill its duties. We do not subscribe to the Lombrosian thesis that all criminals are sick and that all of our vices are the product of physical ailments; but we do affirm that, on the physiological plane, a sick man has more difficulty being honest than others. (1924, 13)

By mentioning Lombroso and using the rhetoric of fin-de-siècle positivist essays, the priority of the company’s campaign was to convince consumers that disease is a danger that awaits both the family and Argentine society. In support of this argument, the book mentions irritation, discouragement, headaches, heart palpitations, insomnia, oversleeping, and drowsiness. Illnesses that lead to “moral debilitation” and that good cooking could prevent. For all these health issues, the argument went, good digestion is the cure. Furthermore, by taking care of her family’s digestion, the housewife would contribute to defending the values of the Argentine nation.²⁰ Jorge Salessi refers to the importance of the “specter of the epidemic” in Argentina as an antecedent of the hygienist movement, “one of the key disciplines in the Argentine modernization project between 1870-1900” (1995, 14). During this period, hygiene became a matter of national sanitary policy through which the state sought not only to clean up the city but also to confront the “moral” ills that immigration had brought with it.²¹ As a consequence, Jorge Salessi points out, “national hygiene policy was translated, more than in the construction of sanitation infrastructure outside the city of Buenos Aires, into a significant symbolic production that imagined that the patriotic and racially pure interior was threatened by the invisible enemy of the epidemic” (1995, 29). The idea of a “criminal” unhealthiness began to permeate the cultural imaginary.²² The enemy was no longer an invisible threat but was embodied in the day labourers, farm workers, and foreign workers who arrived en masse to work in the country, and who formed a part of numerous industries, including meat processing, whose foreign workforce grew almost 70% between the 1910s and 1930s (Lobato, 2001).²³ As I will show, the pages of the cookbook do not only portray this migrant and threatening workforce, they domesticate it.

Images of hygiene

During the first decades of the twentieth century, and thanks to the development of image-printing technologies, modern cookbooks became a materially hybrid genre with attractive pictures that engaged readers to buy and read cooking manuals on a mass scale. La Negra’s cookbook is part of this publishing trend, including photographs and illustrations interspersed between its recipes. However, despite the centrality of the concept of “culinary arts”, the book does not include aestheticizing images of the ornamented dishes, but rather black-and-white photographs of the Avellaneda meat-processing plant, its workers, and storefronts.

Through these photographs, the Compañía Sansinena cuts out and selects which parts of the plant it will show to consumers and which will remain hidden. Thus, for example, images of the slaughter room floors are left out, but photos of the elegant urban branches are included, “whose art nouveau style evokes tea rooms more than it does butcheries” (Silvestri 2003, 239). The cookbook also shows two views of the factory: the first is a panoramic shot of the facilities (a distant shot taken from the other side of the Riachuelo), and the second is an aerial view “from a bird’s eye view” (Figure 9). Both photographs foreground the factory’s immensity, making scale a value and a synonym of “the great industry”. They also hide the shortcomings of its precarious facilities. In addition to these images of immense industrial infrastructure, the recipes are interrupted by photos that decontextualise domesticity and relate it to factory life. These are not step-by-step images of the cooking process, but rather illustrations that make some of the theoretical problems discussed in the prologue visible, namely scientificity and hygiene.

As an example, one of the photographs shows the General Directorate of Livestock, a group of government veterinarians that, as the photograph’s footnote states, “inspect La Negra’s meat and products, providing a constant guarantee for the public’s health, and which find our products to be a symbol of perfect hygiene and absolute purity”. Another image shows an empty interior full of instruments and test tubes: this is La Negra’s chemical lab, in which “they meticulously analyze the meat and spices that comprise the Canned Meats, Cold Cuts, and Sausages produced at this popular Meat Processing Plant”. Below this image, another shows a group of doctors in white coats who pose with their microscopes as they conduct a bacteriological examination of meat specimens (Figure 10). Finally, two photographs document the cold rooms filled with “already inspected” cow and sheep carcasses.

These are all scenes of visual control and “inspection” (a word they use insistently), where spaces and bodies are being strictly examined in order to secure hygiene. These scenes of surveillance indicate the impact of the new visual technologies of identification that, from the second half of the nineteenth century, began to be used as tools of state control to safeguard hygiene in every public or private corner of the national territory – especially in those “insalubrious” places inhabited by the working class. Jorge Salessi remarks that the figure of the factory inspector was brought into being in 1894 in Argentina. In 1898, a livestock sanitary police force was also created, linking the population’s health to that of animals (1995, 46). These new figures, alongside new identification technologies such as microscopes and the photographic medium, played a leading role in the cookbook. For La Negra, a meat-processing plant that never passed any of the sanitary inspections conducted there, the myth of “photographic objectivity”²⁴ allowed it to simulate, or “to pose” as, as Sylvia Molloy would put it,²⁵ something that it is not: a modern and hygienic industry. These attributes are mentioned insistently in the advertising slogans that appear at the top of each page: “The most hygienic and best-looking stores in the industry are those of LA NEGRA” (1924, 75); “Well-prepared canned meats, like LA NEGRA’s, do not contain harmful germs or ferments, preserving their nutritional value” (1924, 87). This simulation of hygiene will become more evident when we look more closely at the photographs. The images have been edited and retouched: none of the filth or bloody walls that the inspectors criticise are visible. The floors and walls appear so smooth that they seem, in fact, blurred, and the carcasses that hang in the cold rooms are also made up and outlined in pencil. This photograph of the cold room with animals hanging symmetrically and multiplying toward a vanishing point to infinity (Figure 11) is a symbol of industrial modernity. It is a symbol of the precision of the assembly line and the novelty, at the beginning of the twentieth century, of mass production of identical or very similar products.

What role do these photographs play in a cookbook? Beyond the obvious reading – certifying the quality of the products that the homemaker will use – I find it more revealing to read this image taking into account the position it occupies in the book: on the back of this page, there is another photograph, the only one in which women workers appear (Figure 12). These are not the workers who slog away in the gutting section – a job not dignified enough to be photographed – but instead those of the Canning Department. They wear white aprons and caps on their heads and stop their work to look at the camera intently and with uncomfortable and forced smiles. None of them, it bears mentioning, is Black.²⁶ All of the workers look at the photographer, except two women at the front, who, indifferent, continue with their task with their backs turned to the lens. Toward the back of the frame, at the door, there are two men, one wearing an apron and the other, perhaps a work inspector, wearing a suit.

Figure 12. La Negra’s Canning Department. Source: Mil Fórmulas de Cocina “La Negra” (1924).

Figures 13–16. Illustrations from Libro de Cocina (1940).

This image of the workers is the reverse of the previous photograph; its flip side and, in a certain sense, its complement. The characteristics of the first photograph are reproduced in the second, proposing an implicit association between this group of women, arranged side by side in their workspace, and the pieces of meat that occupy a certain position on the rails of the assembly line. Both the animals and the meat-processing plant workers occupy the last place in the social hierarchy, the last position in the factory. Their bodies are subject to an inspecting male gaze that puts them, as well as the animals, under their surveillance and scrutiny. Mirta Zaida Lobato collected the oral testimonies of the women workers who laboured in the Berisso meat-processing plants a few decades later, in the 1950s. This is how they and their families recall the working experience:

An old textile worker said of his wife who worked in the plants: “Ay…poor thing, when she’d come out of the tripería [gutting] she had a smell that was awful, I remember her hands, nails, because however much she’d wash and perfume it was a smell that penetrated the skin”. A woman worker recalled that “we used to come out of the tripería with a smell that was so bad you couldn’t even travel on a bus”. (1997, 60)

The pungent smell, the men’s clothing, and the work of animal slaughter, a “man’s” job, made these workers especially visible and problematic, yet necessary to the continuity of big industry. They were its cheap labour force. Although their femininity was abandoned in the factory, their “disfigured and stinking” bodies are exhibited in the cookbook, juxtaposed with the recipes and pieces of meat. For decades this picture appeared in La Negra’s cookbook, occupying the exact same position as the reverse side of the hanging meat carcasses. These women were the lower-skilled workers, and their femininity was sacrificed on the factory floor in order to be restored, symbolically, in the luxury brand “La Negra”, a name that racialises the bodies of these workers by establishing a relationship between the white women in the photograph and their Afro-Argentine predecessors, who already by the second decade of the twentieth century had largely disappeared from the Argentine labour force.

Final remarks: The disappearance of the factory

In 1940, a new edition of La Negra’s cookbook was published. With a new title, Libro de cocina, and a brand-new image, the book included not a thousand, but two hundred recipes selected from the previous publication. This completely redesigned edition included full-colour pictures (in fact, the book has more images than recipes), but none of them portrays the meatpacking plant or its workers. The focus is placed, instead, on the cans and preserves produced by La Negra with full-size pictures of the goods and colourful mise en scènes, where the cans appear next to ornamented dishes at luxury houses and restaurants (Figures 13–16). By the 1940s, the photos of the factory, taken originally in the 1910s, were completely outdated. By excluding the new facilities and its current workers, this last edition of the cookbook sought to ease the tensions that arose from a “dirty” factory and undignified labour. However, the brand’s new iconography – which, as I have mentioned, presents a Black woman as a caricature with darkened skin and enlarged, red lips – is reproduced everywhere in the book. While the cookbook’s texts and illustrations address a consumption-driven middle class and urban commodity culture, they reveal the tensions inherent in the construction of domestic whiteness. Compressed into an edible object, La Negra’s goods and cookbooks represent this transition between a white-middle-class ideology that domesticated and commodified Blackness, and a Black subjectivity and labour which cannot be completely erased from the national culture.

Translated by Anayvelyse Allen-Mossman

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Graciela Montaldo, Ana Paulina Lee, Ronald Briggs, and Fernando Degiovanni, for reading an early draft of this essay and giving me valuable comments. I am also grateful to the anonymous readers, whose detailed feedback and suggestions helped me frame this project and strengthen my arguments. Special thanks to Alexandra Vialla Méndez for proofreading the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Begoña Alberdi

Begoña Alberdi is currently a Core Lecturer in Literature Humanities at Columbia University. She received her PhD from the Latin American and Iberian Cultures Department at Columbia University and her Bachelor’s and Master’s degree from the Pontificia Universidad Católica (Chile). Her research interests include women’s and gender studies, labour history, food studies, history of technology, and media studies.

Notes

1 See Milanesio (2010). The author has studied the shift between this period, where the Argentine beef industry depended on international markets, and the Peronist administration, that prioritized internal beef consumption over the British market.

2 Other food scholars have mentioned La Negra’s cookbook. See Caldo (2013) and Pite (2012).

3 On cookbooks as political artifacts, see Appadurai (1981) and Ferguson (2020).

4 All translations are by Anayvelyse Allen-Mossman.

5 As understood by Social Reproduction Theory. Under this framework, there are two separate but interdependent spaces: spaces for production of value and spaces for reproduction of labour power. As explained by Tithi Bhattacharya, “social reproduction theorists perceive the relation between labor dispensed to produce commodities and labor dispensed to produce people as part of the systemic totality of capitalism. The framework thus seeks to make visible labor and work that are analytically hidden by classical economists and politically denied by policy makers” (2017, 2).

6 For a history of the first years of Argentina’s industrialization and the role of women in the factory workforce during the Export Boom Years, see Rocchi (2006).

7 On the mechanization of the meat industry and its inherent contradictions, see Giedion (1975).

8 For studies interested in the association between Black bodies and food in American culture, see Kern-Foxworth (1994), Witt (1999), and Tompkins (2007).

9 As defined by Kimberle Crenshaw, the concept of intersectionality denotes the various ways in which race and gender interact to shape violence against women of colour. These experiences cannot be understood within the traditional boundaries of race or gender discrimination but at the intersection of both categories (1991, 1244).

10 See Kutzinski (1993). The author has examined the construction of the female mulata as a sexual commodity in nineteenth-century Cuban culture.

11 On the convergence between hygienism and eugenism in the meat industry of Buenos Aires, see López-Durán and Moore (2018).

12 In early December 1917, meat processing workers in Avellaneda (La Blanca and La Negra) joined the mobilization of workers that had begun in the plants in Berisso (Swift and Armour) and Zárate (Hall de Zárate and Smithfield). Among the demands presented to the company were the eight-hour workday, overtime pay, raises, the provision of uniforms, free medical care for victims of accidents, and “greater respect” from the employer. Faced with the rejection of their demands, the Sociedad de Resistencia de los Frigoríficos [Meat Processing Plant Resistance Society] organized a general strike which other unions like the Federación Obrera Marítima [Federation of Maritime Workers] and the Federación Ferrocarrilera [Railway Workers Federation] joined (Lobato 2001, 168–171).

13 As Ezequiel Adamovsky points out, the emergence of the middle class as a social category in Argentina did not come hand in hand with a unified “middle class” identity. Historians trace the phenomenon back to the mid-nineteenth century along with important demographic shifts, an increase in salaried labour, and the formation of a true “consumer society”. Nevertheless, “the notion that there is an existent ‘Argentine middle class’ – was only introduced into the national culture beginning in 1919 and was done so through the political sphere” (Adamovsky 2016, 11).

14 I have been able to trace 18 editions of the book from 1917 to 1935 and then an apparently last edition from 1940 (which I refer to at the end of this essay). Although I am comparing multiple editions (1924, 1930, 1935, and 1940), for the purpose of this essay I will quote from the 7^th edition published in 1924 (unless noted). When there is a difference worth mentioning between these editions, I highlight it in the article.

15 The book was published under the Amorrortu imprint, founded in Buenos Aires in 1916 by the Basque immigrant Sebastián de Amorrortu. Its catalog primarily included reference books like medical manuals, scholarly texts, encyclopedias, dictionaries, and telephone books. The new edition of 1940 was published by Guillermo Kraft, known for introducing many technical advances in the Argentine graphic industry, such as the steam-powered lithographic machine and the first linotype.

16 SIAM, founded by the Italian immigrant Torcuato di Tella in the 1910s, started producing commercial refrigerators in Argentina in the 1930s. However, the expansion in production and commercialization began only in the 1950s. The “Siam fridge” was one of the most affordable in the market and was considered both a technological conquest and a symbol of working-class prosperity (Milanesio 2013, 23–25).

17 For a history of the emergence of domestic science in late-nineteenth century America and its relation to the commercial food industry, see Shapiro (2001).

18 As many feminist scholars have examined, products like instant cake mixes and canned food did not reduce the homemaker’s time in the kitchen. By considering domestic work in a chain, the time saved in cooking was later spent in an elaborate presentation of the dishes, disguising their industrial nature (Marling 1994, 225–228). For analyses on how “time-saving appliances” elevated cleaning and cooking standards as well as the time spent in the kitchen, see Schwartz Cowan (1983) and Pérez (2012), who has examined this process in Argentina.

19 Silvia Federici notes that the concept of “social factory” was introduced by Mario Tronti in his 1966 book Operai e Capitale. In its origins under the Italian operaismo, the concept describes a certain stage of capitalist development where the distinction between society and factory collapses, “so that society becomes a factory and social relations directly become relations of production” (2013, 7). The concept became central among feminist theorists of social reproduction, who interrogated the Marxist theory to make visible the role of women and unwaged domestic work in maintaining workers and non-workers.

20 For a cultural and political history of the “maternalization of women” in Argentina, see Nari (2004). The author shows how in Buenos Aires, between the 1890s and 1940s, maternity transforms into a topic of public and political debate just as the threat of a new feminine factory workforce emerged.

21 Oscar Terán links the emergence of the positivist essay in Argentina with the massive influx of immigrants that arrived in the 1880s. The author points out that by 1914, 30% of the population was foreign-born. Thus, “the figure of the immigrant must have been so obviously impossible to ignore in daily life in Argentina” (1987, 15–16).

22 For a cultural history of the place of the disease in late nineteenth-century Argentine culture, see Nouzeilles (2000). For a history of the development of criminology in Argentina, see García Ferrari (2010).

23 On the meat processing plants established in Berisso, the industrial zone of the city of La Plata, Mirta Zaida Lobato points out that from the inception of these industries until the 1930s, most of the workers came from Europe or Asia Minor. During the 1930s and the beginning of the 1940s, the number of foreigners decreased, but only around the middle of the twentieth century did workers’ nationalization become visible, with a greater presence of workers born in other provinces (2001, 109–118).

24 I use Bazin’s terms here. For the author, the particularity and fascination with photography resides in its “power of credibility”. As a “trace” of the real, photography is originated, in its analogic form, through automatic contact between the light emanated from the model and the photographic support (1990, 27–29). This phenomenological perspective marks an historical and aesthetic period, spanning the end of the nineteenth century until the first half of the twentieth, in which photography is understood as a “vera icon” of modernity or, in the words of Hans Belting, as “the modern medium of the image, par excellence” (2011, 264).

25 Sylvia Molloy defines the pose as a “decisive gesture in Spanish America’s cultural politics at the end of the nineteenth century” (2012, 42). For Molloy, the pose is a social, political, and cultural practice of falsification and simulation that characterizes a nineteenth-century cultural way of being. In a broad sense, the pose relates to how subjects, cultures, and nations “exhibit” themselves during the nineteenth century, using visibility and its artifices as a platform for constructing an identity.

26 Although in its reconstruction of Black history in Argentina, George Reid Andrews does not reference Black women’s labour in slaughterhouses, what he describes about the disappearance of Black washerwomen is representative of what occurred in plants like La Negra, where white immigrant workers predominated in the 1920s: “At as late a date as 1873, a photograph of the washerwomen at the banks of the river showed that one was Black and the other white; in 1899, a magazine article described the disappearance of Black washerwomen, who had turned in their posts to the ‘fierce Italian women, restrained and tireless’” (1989, 216).