Spaghetti Alla Carbonara

Carbonara () is a pasta dish made with fatty cured pork, hard cheese, eggs, salt, and black pepper. It is typical of the Lazio region of Italy. The dish took its modern form and name in the middle of the 20th century.

The cheese used is usually . Some variations use Parmesan, Grana Padano, or a combination of cheeses. Spaghetti is the most common pasta, but bucatini or rigatoni are also used. While guanciale, a cured pork jowl, is traditional, some variations use pancetta, and lardons of smoked bacon are a common substitute outside Italy.

Origin and history

As with many recipes, the origins of the dish and its name are obscure; most sources trace its origin to the region of Lazio.

The dish forms part of a family of dishes consisting of pasta with cured pork, cheese, and pepper, one of which is . It is very similar to , a dish dressed with melted lard and a mixture of eggs and cheese, but not meat or pepper. is documented as far back as 1839 and, according to researchers, anecdotal evidence indicates that some Italians born before World War II associate that name with the dish now known as "carbonara".

There are many theories for the origin of the name , which is probably more recent than the dish itself. There is no good evidence for any of them:
* Since the name is derived from , some people believe the dish was first made as a hearty meal for Italian charcoal workers. In parts of the United States, this etymology gave rise to the term ''coal miner's spaghetti''.
* John F. Mariani writes that some people believe it was created as a tribute to the Carbonari () secret society prominent in the early, repressed stages of Italian unification () in the early 19th century.
* It seems more probable that it is an "urban dish" from Rome.

The names and are unrecorded before the Second World War; notably, it is absent from Ada Boni's 1930 (). The 1931 edition of the Guide of Italy of the TCI describes a pasta () dish from Cascia and Monteleone di Spoleto, in Umbria, whose sauce contains whipped eggs, sausage, and pork fat and lean, which could be considered as a precursor of carbonara, although it does not contain any cheese.

The name first appears in print in 1950, when the Italian newspaper described it as a Roman dish sought out by American officers after the Allied liberation of Rome in 1944.

According to one hypothesis, a young Italian Army cook named Renato Gualandi created the dish in 1944, with other Italian cooks, as part of a dinner for the U.S. Army, because the Americans "had fabulous bacon, very good cream, some cheese and powdered egg yolks".

Food writer Alan Davidson and food blogger and historian Luca Cesari have both stated that carbonara was born in Rome around 1944, just after the liberation of the city, probably because of the bacon that flowed in quantity with the U.S. Army. Cesari adds that the dish is mentioned in an Italian movie from 1951, while the first attested recipe is in an illustrated cookbook published in Chicago in 1952 by Patricia Bronté. According to Cesari, the recipe was probably brought to the United States by an American serviceman who had passed through Rome during the Italian campaign or by an Italian American who had met it in Rome, making carbonara a dish that closely links Italy and the United States. The controversial Italian academic and professor Alberto Grandi also said that carbonara's first attested recipe is American, citing Cesari, a claim that has been criticized in Italy.

In 1954, the first recipe for carbonara published in Italy appeared in magazine, although the recipe featured pancetta, garlic, and Gruyère cheese. The same year, carbonara was included in Elizabeth David's ''Italian Food'', an English-language cookbook published in Great Britain.

Preparation

The pasta is cooked in boiling water salted only moderately, due to the saltiness of the cured meat and the hard cheese. The meat is briefly fried in a pan in its own fat. A mixture of raw eggs (or yolks), grated cheese, and a liberal amount of ground black pepper is combined with the hot pasta either in the pasta pot or in a serving dish or bain-marie, but away from direct heat, to avoid curdling the egg. The fried meat is then added and the mixture is tossed, creating a rich, creamy sauce with bits of meat spread throughout. Various shapes of pasta can be used, almost always dried durum wheat pasta.

Variations

Guanciale is the most commonly used meat for the dish in Italy, but pancetta and ('smoked pancetta') are also used republication of ''La Buona Vera Cucina Italiana'', 1966. and, in English-speaking countries, bacon is often used as a substitute. The usual cheese is ; occasionally Parmesan, Grana Padano, or a combination of hard cheeses are used. Recipes differ as to which part of the egg is used—some use the whole egg, some others only the yolk, and still others a mixture. The amount of eggs used also vary, but the intended result is a creamy sauce from mild heating. For vegetarians or those observing Jewish kosher laws, there are also recipes that utilize mushrooms and vegetables instead of meat.

Some preparations have more sauce and therefore use tubular pasta, such as penne, which is better suited to holding sauce. Cream is not used in most Italian recipes, with some notable exceptions from the 20th century. However, it is often employed in other countries, as adding cream makes the dish more stable. Similarly, garlic is found in some recipes, but mostly outside Italy. Outside Italy, variations on carbonara may include green peas, broccoli, tenderstem broccoli, leeks, onions, other vegetables or mushrooms, and may substitute a meat such as ham or for the fattier guanciale or pancetta.

Sauce

A product described as carbonara sauce is sold as a ready-to-eat convenience food in grocery stores in many countries. Unlike the original preparation, which is inseparable from its dish as its creamy texture is created on the pasta itself, the ultra-processed versions of carbonara are prepared sauces to be applied onto separately cooked pasta. They may be thickened with cream and sometimes food starch, and often use bacon or cubed pancetta slices instead of guanciale.

See also

* Roman cuisine
* List of pasta
* List of pasta dishes

References

Further reading

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{{Cuisine of Italy

Cuisine of Lazio
Spaghetti dishes
Italian sauces