Grillmaster

Culture, meat, and the traditions of fathers and sons.

My dad cooking on the traditional Argentine parrilla he built in our backyard in Bayonne, circa 2017.

More than being a gaucho or a professional footballer, every boy in Argentina dreams of one day inheriting his father’s place at the parrilla.

I, too, had this dream as a boy. One day, my father would hand over the carving fork and bestow upon me the honor of leading the family asado. But would I be ready to take it when the moment of truth arrived?

Unlike its more extravagant American cousins, the Argentine parrilla is simply constructed and effectively useful for accomplishing a single objective: cooking as much of a cow, pig, or “any other living creature that walks the Earth’s surface,” per the old Argentine saying¹, as possible.

Every Sunday of my childhood, my dad stood in the backyard drinking watered-down red wine², sweating over hot charcoal, and slicing up meat he’d bought at the local Hispanic supermarket or Seabra’s (pronounced see-ah-brahs), a Portuguese market in the largely Iberian and South American section of Newark where the butchers meet the high standards of his homeland. They say Argentinians use more parts of a cow than any other nation or culture. This certainly seems true based on what I observed in my childhood home, where ribeyes and burgers were passed over in favor of short ribs, blood sausage (morcilla), flank steak (either vacío or matambre), and small intestines (chinchulines).

When I was a boy, nothing got in the way of the Sunday tradition. Even in the midst of an apocalyptic storm, my dad would set up two ladders, lay a piece of plywood from one to the other, clamp it down, and do his grilling in a rain jacket. On these occasions, when my mom couldn’t get outside to yell or hit him with a broom, a Newport cigarette usually hung from his lips.