Chinese food has this issue as well, most of what you find in the US is not the real thing. I had the pleasure of eating at a joint in Reno right before i moved away that had truly authentic Chinese food and it was like nothing i’d ever tried before and was great. Sadly the restaurant never had any clientele, i really hope they didn’t close down but my hunch is that they likely did.
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My goal for this year is to eat at Pipero. Looking forward to it!
But yeah, I think a lot of the videos got pretty close and they were essentially just nitpicking, which is fun in its own right. It’s the same with all these regional cuisines. Chicken korma really isn’t what they serve in UK, for example. Recipes get adapted for local palates and ingredients, same as language.
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He’s not talking about rinsing the guanciole to sanitize it. That would be counter productive to pointless.
A whole muscle is sterile inside. And surface bacteria are killed by the heat of the pan. That’s why we can eat a rare steak without dying. And a cured product is rubbed with salt and nitrates, a big point behind that is it kills harmful surface bacteria and prevents it from coming back.
Washing meat just spreads bacteria around the kitchen. Creating cross contamination that the heat of cooking won’t kill. It’s pretty dangerous from a restaurant sanitation point of view.
The kind of guanciole Oliver is using is still crusted with its spice rub. Which contains a lot of black pepper and juniper. Which you don’t want in your carbonara. Guanciole is also really salty. So it’s common to rinse it or soak it before use to remove some salt and the spices.
Other wise I’ve seen Italians come to blows over whether there is garlic or peas in carbonara. They seem deeply unwilling to accept that any given traditional dish varies with time and region. I’ve seen the earliest versions of the printed recipe (from the 30s) attacked as inauthentic.
And the use of garlic in Italian cuisine is weirdly controversial. Southern Italy uses garlic the way Americans do apparently. That’s where we picked up the habit. But I knew a guy from Piedmont who swore Italians used no garlic at all. Except scapes in the spring. A guy from Venice who insisted everything got just a bit but no more. And two guys from Milan who were really heated about only a bit and only in specific dishes. But they disagreed on which dishes got it.
And thats sort of in line with something I’ve noticed with a lot of the Italians I know. They’re curiously opposed to strong flavors of any kind. Even complaining about ridiculously traditional Italian things that Americans and the rest of Europe have never heard of. Like botarga (a cured fish Roe). Most of the Italian chefs I know, And even some non-chefs from Rome refuse to use guanciole or panceta in carbonara because it’s “too salty”. Preferring American style bacon or prosciutto.
And all of those guys, barring the Romans, considered Roman cooks (even the famous ones), hacks. And Roman food to be wrong in some way. Even for Roman dishes. Seems a weird reputation based on Rome’s traditional poverty and status as a tourism center. Italian cooks from other areas consider all Roman food hopelessly Americanised for the tourist market. Or bland, or not fresh enough. And when confronted with a Roman dish they love. Find a way it’s not technically Roman. True or not.
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No True Carbonara
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One thing I’ve learned in trying to emulate “real” Italian cuisine is that it’s oftentimes so simple and the quality of the ingredients can make a huge difference in the way the finished product turns out. People often want to guck it up with lots of garlic and other stuff to conform to our American stereotype of “Italian” cuisine.
I recall reading somewhere that carbonara was actually unknown in Italy until right after WWII and was the result of adapting readily available allied military rations of bacon and eggs. Don’t know if it’s true or not but it’s interesting.
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Sounds like post hoc rationalisation of something someone ignorant of Italian history and culture might have come up with, based on limited observation of few circumstances at one point in time, given that …
…which is a lot more plausible, to me.
But I am not starting an argument over it. Who cares where it originated, it is a ‘classic’ dish for a reason, and adulterating or improving it with other ingredients is akin to standing on the shoulders of Italian shepherds to create something new, which may be good or bad, depending on your view of the original and your sense of adventure. That it can lead to such variations is testament to its ‘classic’ status.
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My post was flagged, I assume it was because I was generalising people based on their nationality. I know this is bad and had tried to let my post reflect that I know this, and that my commentary was meant partly tongue in cheek. Upon second reading I see that this was not so clear and that I seemed quite upset with the nation of Italy. My experiences may have been mostly negative but that is not enough to judge an entire nation, I’m sure there are plenty of nice people, I just had bad luck and/or visited the wrong places.
I don’t like these generalisations, and said so, but the truth is that in Europe we all know these stereotypes of other countries, this can be pretty harmful and I don’t like it. However some parts, especially when you visit the touristy bits, as a tourist, hold some truth.
The French have a reputation for speaking only French and acting insulted and condescending if you don’t speak French, or even if you do speak it but not to their preferred level of competence. This is something you will experience if you visit a coffee shop in the busy tourist areas of Paris. However when you move away from there, my experience is they are delighted if you know even some French and will help you as best they can even if you don’t.
I tried to have a little fun with these stereotypes and failed. I should have known better.
Now follows my original post, unchanged:
I don’t like generalizations of people, so apologies in advanced, but I can’t stand Italians… Loud, aggressive, unwilling to compromise and/or apologize.
I’ve been there a few times but the last time I had the opportunity, we drove to France as fast as we could. The French have a bit of a reputation too, for being snobby and and insulted if you don’t speak French, but in my experiences that reputation is, like most generalizations (including this one of the Italians) mostly undeserved.
But they do make good coffee. Even in the gas stations in Italy, on the highway to France, you will get a proper espresso.
There’s no published reference or recipe until the 30s. But I dunno if I buy the military ration thing though. Fresh eggs and bacon weren’t exactly regular military rations. The standard goofball line on that is allied soldiers “comendeering” such things from locals. And various sorts of bacon and cured pork are pretty Frikin old in italy. IIRC the first published record of it is from 1930 too. Before any allied forces would have been there.
Carbonara is part of a suite of pantry dishes that developed in Italy around the turn of the century as the general populace got a bit wealthier and even the poor began to have access to certain stables. Cured pork, eggs, cheese, And dried pasta being staple items every kitchen in cities would regularly have on hand starting in the late 19th century. There are a bunch of them. Putanesca being another big one.
Any time you see that the first printed reference to something is from x year you can assume it existed and developed for decades before hand. Especially poverty dishes and home cooking. It’s not like its sprung into existence in 1930 and was immediately published.
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Yes, I don’t actually subscribe to that version of the story myself but it’s a pretty common carbonara origin myth.
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Well it’s true that it wasn’t common outside of Rome until after the war. And doesn’t seem to have been visible enough to be referenced in print until the 30s. For all the foot stamping about tradition it’s a really, really modern dish.
As are, weirdly, most of the “traditional” dishes we hear about regardless of cuisine. The bulk of recipes we’re familiar with today only really date to the 18th o 19th century. At the oldest
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I watched the recipes they were reviewing, then I watched the recipies they presented as authentic, and I think I’d rather have the “inauthentic” ones, they look tastier.
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Probably how they do it in Naples.
That’s a somewhat garbled version of what actually was the post-war origin of the recipe. I’ve spoken to Enrico Blasi who knew the old coal-seller who first cooked it, his mom remembering the man’s name as Federico - the self-same Federico documented as one of the Salomone brothers who set up their coal shop in vicolo Montevecchio in Rome, as confirmed by his granddaughter (scroll down to “History”). Here’s Enrico’s record of the origin story he heard (my translation), as first published in three comments to an italian gastro-scientific article on Carbonara:
I’d like to point out the origin story that I know of, which involves Americans in part: near via della Pace in Rome, and more precisely between vicolo Osti and vicolo Montevecchio, right at the corner, until the early '60s there was a coal-seller… right after the war, this coal-seller, having access to coal and firewood, took to cooking simple pasta for passing Allied troops (the only tourists at the time), with cacio and pepe if he could find it… once he saw a soldier mix in one of those famous K rations with bacon and eggs, into the pasta, he tried it, found it good, and then perfected the recipe… He told me this himself in the '60s, when I was 12, so… why should he have lied? In our neighborhood a lot of people knew this same story.
Buon appetito!
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(See this re-enacted version of the chopped pork and yolk breakfast K ration.)
Went to an Italian restaurant in Costa Rica where the theatrical schtick with spaghetti carbonara was that they would bring a giant hemisphere of cheese table side, and heat up the inside of the cheese bowl with a torch until the surface of the cheese is just starting to melt, then mix in the spaghetti and meat (I forget which they used) until everything was covered with cheese. I don’t think there was any cream or egg much less garlic. It was quite cheesy. Very cheesy. Did I mention it was cheesy?
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I’m a 'mercan goddamn it!
I put garlic in EVERYTHING!
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Any time there is one guy who “cooked it first” it’s almost invariably untrue. “why would he lie?” isn’t an academic standard of evidence and the dish is incredibly similar to several dishes that clearly predate it.
I have no doubt that blasi thought he’d found something definitive. But food and culture don’t work that way. They seldom have clean origin points. And I don’t see a GI mixing already cooked bacon and eggs, or instant bacon and eggs. Into caccio e pepe making much sense as an origin given Italians were already using eggs and pork the way theyre used in carbonara.
I do have to correct myself though. Just looked it up to check. The dish is missing from printed sources until the 50’s. I done misremembered.
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I can see why it sounds unusual/unlikely, however:
- most recipes aren’t so modern, so though normally an origin is more interwoven/organic, this is a peculiar case
- Salomone converted his coal shop in vicolo Montevecchio into a trattoria that was there until the late 70’s (I spoke to elderly local artisans who confirmed this); it was later taken over by his granddaughter, who subsequently moved it to its new, current location restyling the name to the feminine so as to reflect that she now ran the show
- the recipe has always been known in the feminine, so her promotion of the origin story to generations of tourists has certainly played a part in the recipe’s fortune
- the fact that this specific concept of combining raw yolk, pork (plus cheese) on pasta - neither by the carbonara name nor any other - does not appear in any pre-war cookbooks is pretty hard to explain in any other reasonable way
- I’ve spoken to Enrico, who has shown no particular interest to reap anything from his story (he’s in a completely different line of work, and hasn’t ever returned to it other than in private) - it’s what he remembers from having grown up in this neighborhood
- a plate of warm, plain spaghetti are as basic a hot meal as befits post-war Rome; that someone might want to enrich it with a left-over pork&yolk ration… makes perfect sense.
Add to this that all other explanations for the name the recipe is (and always has been) known by make no proper sense - neither the “carbonari” story, nor that the pepper (not actually that important here, and much more importantly present in plenty of other recipes) somehow “looks like coal dust”, nor any other fanciful etimology… in my view clinches it.
late 50’s, sorry typo.
Obviously, we need someone to police the use of the proper recipe for this dish.
Call the Carbonieri.
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