Ingredients: Spaghetti Alla Carbonara

Not Your Bacon & Eggs

About 40 years ago, a client who became a great cooking and travel buddy said she was cooking spaghetti with eggs and bacon for us. We were completely bewildered with visions of fried eggs criss-crossed with crisp strips of bacon over a mound of helpless and hopeless pasta. She, who had travelled to Italy, had eaten Spaghetti Alla Carbonara and turned this dish out in 30 minutes. We, who had never been, were amazed at this iconic dish. And as with other pasta dishes, like Spaghetti Cacio e Pepe,or Aglio, Olio e Peperoncino, it can be prepared “a mezzanotte”  or at midnight, when you are hungry again and the gelato shops are closed. 

 My friend’s version was so satisfactory that I was determined to recreate the meal. The first time I tried to prepare this dish. I pulled out an “Italian” cookbook written by one of those writers who wrote numerous cuisine-by-country cook books: using the formula of (Fill In The Number) best dishes from  (Fill In The Blank) countries. It had butter, cream, eggs, and I think bacon because in the 70s’ and 80s’ pancetta or guanciale was not available. And it was labor intensive.

 Shrouded in Smoke

The roots of this dish are uncertain, and theories range from charcoal worker food to WWII American soldiers’ request that Italians make bacon and eggs. Some food historians posit that since no recipe was found recorded by Ada Boni in her book published in 1930, that it could not have been a traditional dish made by carbonai – workers who foraged wood and turned it into charcoal. Legend has it that the carbonai carried eggs, pecorino and guanciale in their bags – the pepper coating on the guanciale  flavored the dish – and one food writer traced the word back to an Abruzzese term for pancetta – carbonada.  British food writer Felicity Cloak  wrote in The Guardian:

“Sophia Loren claims to have happened upon a group of these lucky fellows while filming Two Women in the mountains in the late fifties – who obligingly cooked her a slap-up carbonara lunch.”

Food historian Francine Sagan traces the first printed recognition of SAC in La Stampa in 1950, and in Elizabeth David’s book Italian Food in 1954, which supports the theory that it evolved as a dish after World War II. Soldiers wanted something made from powdered eggs and bacon after the Allied liberation of Rome in 1944. Some evidence exists that a Bolognese chef, Renato Gualandi,(1921-2016) created the Ur Maccheroni Alla Carbonara, a main dish he prepared in the liberated seaside town of Riccione. It was to be a banquet for Allied military brass, including Harold Macmillan, and UK Generals Harold Alexander and Sir Oliver Leese. According to Gualandi, only army rations of dried foods and some meat were available, and he created a pasta dish out of the bacon, cream, processed cheese and dried egg yolk, with a generous garnish of freshly ground black pepper. In interviews later (he was the chef owner of 3G, a very successful Bolognese restaurant) Gualandi said he wanted to unite Italian cuisine with that of the Anglo-Saxon liberators.  Barilla has even made a somewhat  cringeworthy marketing film very loosely based on this banquet. After watching it, I felt it only fair to share this irresistible clip of Alberto Sordi in Un Americano A Roma. It offers another Italian idea of American cuisine. (You may have to turn on subtitles in settings as in some browsers they don’t appear automatically.)

My favorite way of making this dish is based on the video from Giallo Zafferano. Here are some thoughts from an American cook on this most popular form of  preparing pasta in Italy: Use guanciale if you can get it, as it is fattier than pancetta and that rendered fat makes for a creamier sauce…also the pepper from the guanciale adds a little extra kick. If you use pancetta, then you may want to add a bit of oil to your pan as you gently sauté it. In either case, you want to sauté over medium low heat. You do not want it crisp and brown like bacon. Which reminds me, bacon is smoked, while pancetta and guanciale are simply cured, and the resulting flavor will be different. You must take the pan off the heat (do not just turn the burner off) right before you add the egg mixture. Also don’t be afraid to add more pasta water to get your sauce creamy. I find that it varies each time I make it.