This post is a good example of why I have created this vault. Argentina On Two Steaks A Day has been online since 2006, and it is a gem to share and reread. Consider the quotes from it below. It’s possible that coffee, like Argentine yogurt, is just meant as a delivery mechanism for sugar. The sugar cubes here are the size of Lego bricks, and when you order an espresso you are given three packets of sugar the size of a small wallet. There is a more serious kind of confectionary panic that goes beyond glazing, and it brings us to the true dark side of Argentine cooking. I am talking about dulce de leche. 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. There is a special dulce de leche shelf in the supermarket dairy case, and the containers go up to a liter in size. Even the churros are stuffed with it - the churros, Montresor! For anyone who has had pastries in Europe, the added horror is that dulce de leche is identical in color, texture and consistency to a number of much less sweet, tasty fillings, like the earthy chestnut material the French call crème de marrons, or the tart kind of plum butter popular in Eastern European bakeries. You see a thick layer of dark brown jam-like material and think, this couldn’t possibly be caramel, there’s just too much of it. And so worldliness leads you to great giant bites and then disaster. Thank God, therefore, for the ice cream. The ice cream in Buenos Aires is easily the best I have ever eaten, and the parlors that serve it are everywhere. The secret seems to be an insistence on making it from scratch in each heladeria, since the only remotely similar ice cream I’ve tasted was the kind our chemistry department in college used to make from liquid nitrogen in its annual bid to attract new majors. I spent a considerable amount of time trying to figure out how meals work in Argentina, and they remain a mystery to me. Dinner is clear enough: people tend to go to restaurants beginning at ten o’clock (for those with small children), with the main rush around eleven, and dinner is pretty much over at one or so in the morning. And breakfast - or rather, its absence - follows as a logical consequence of eating a steak the size of a beagle at midnight. But I have yet to figure out whether people eat some kind of meal in the afternoon, and if so, when. Wander into any bistro or restaurant between eleven and six and you will be served a delicious lunch-sized meal, but you are likely to be the only person there, with the waiter mopping floors in the corner and the parrilla stacked with raw meat for the midnight dinner rush. I’ve come to think the culprit in the missing Argentine lunch scene is yerba mate.