Sierras of Cordoba Food & Traditional Cuisine

The sierras eat what the hills produce and what the immigrants brought.

Goat — chivito — is the regional meat, raised on the dry slopes and roasted whole or in pieces over embers, and it is what a serrano family cooks for an occasion rather than beef.

Salami and cheese from the Colonia Caroya area, settled by Friulian Italians in the 1870s, are a protected regional product and genuinely good — the salami is made to a northern Italian recipe that has not changed much.

The Calamuchita valley adds a German and Swiss layer: smoked sausage, black forest cake, strudel and rye bread, in villages that look startlingly alpine.

And the region drinks fernet with cola in quantities that are genuinely a national curiosity — Córdoba consumes a large share of all the fernet drunk in Argentina, and Argentina drinks most of the world’s supply.

Chivito al asador, kid goat splayed on an iron cross beside a wood fire for several hours — the regional occasion dish, cooked in the hills and at the roadside restaurants on the high road.

Salame de Colonia Caroya, a dry-cured Friulian-style salami with protected designation, eaten as a picada with local cheese and olives.

Locro and humita, as across northern Argentina, with the sierras’ own variations.

Trout from the mountain rivers, and jam and preserves from the orchard valleys — quince, fig and rosehip are sold at every roadside stall.

Alfajores cordobeses, filled with fruit jam rather than dulce de leche and glazed white, which is a regional variant Argentines argue about.

Kuchen and strudel in the Calamuchita valley, and the smoked sausage that goes with the beer.

Roadside stalls along the sierra roads sell jam, honey, herbs, salami and cheese, and buying from them is part of the drive.

Colonia Caroya is worth a detour for its salami producers, most of which are family operations that will let you taste before buying.

Picada is the regional social form: a board of salami, cheese, olives and bread with a drink before dinner, shared standing up, and it can go on long enough to replace dinner.

Córdoba city has a substantial student population and a correspondingly good and cheap eating scene, with the Mercado Norte for produce and cooked food.

Fernet: served in a tall glass, roughly a third fernet to two-thirds cola, over ice, and mixed by the drinker. Ordering it anywhere in the province is unremarkable; ordering it anywhere else marks you as cordobes.

Córdoba has an old wine history that almost disappeared and is now coming back.

The Jesuits planted vines at their estancias in the seventeenth century, and by the nineteenth century the province had a substantial industry — it was among Argentina’s largest producers before phylloxera, prohibition-era regulation and competition from Mendoza wiped it out almost entirely.

Since the 2000s a revival has taken hold in the Traslasierra and Calamuchita valleys and around Colonia Caroya, on granite soils at 700 to 1,200 metres with cool nights. Malbec, Cabernet Franc, Tannat and the aromatic Isabella grape are grown, and a wine route with several dozen small producers now runs through the hills. The wines are distinct from Mendoza’s — lighter, fresher, and made in small quantities.

Beer is the other drink, and Villa General Belgrano’s German brewing tradition has spread into a strong craft scene across the sierras.

Fernet is, in practice, the provincial drink.