EVENTO: Carbonara Day, 6 aprile.
The 6th of April is Carbonara Day! Alas, we had forgotten but, luckily, trillions of social media posts, including one, in the usual slightly deadpan matter-of-fact delivery by the truly excellent and knowledgeable Katie, from Katieparla, reminded us:
We know, there are indeed more important things in the world but, this Carbonara Day happening is actually quite interesting. In was inaugurated in 2017, as a social media event, by the Unione Italiana Food  and theInternational Pasta Organization with the aim of honoring not only the recipe itself, but Italian cuisine in the world in general and is obviously a marketing ploy to sell more pasta. But why the 6th of April? According to an article by Lettera43, an online newspaper, on the 6th of April, 2016, there appeared on a popular French infotainment website, demotivateur.fr, a video explaining how to make la Carbonara (WARNING, it is hard to watch!):
Needless to say, not many Italians were impressed, Barilla, even less so, and many in the French media sided with the unhappy Italian population defining it as offensive to the Italian culinary tradition! Bravi!  The controversy made it also to Australian shores! (Article by the Daily Mail Australia here). Thus the the choice of the 6th of April.
Of course the media exaggerated the whole episode and surely no one lost any sleep over it. But why does lacarbonara prepared in the video truly seem so disgusting? Why are there so many videos on Instagram where people delight in shocking Italians, on purpose, by asking for ananas on their pizza? Franco La Cecla, in La pasta e la pizza  suggests that a cuisine, any cuisine, is like a language, with its rules, exceptions, structure, usage, logic, and the capacity, and inclination, to innovate within, however, certain parameters. So, just as we speak of a linguistic competence, we can also speak of a culinary competence. Basically, la carbonara, as prepared in the video, is a culinary monster which defies the acquired and shared culinary rules. Here's a (rather long) passage from La pasta e la pizza:
Una cosa di cui le cucine italiane sono l'esempio più lampante per gli studiosi di alimentazione, ma anche per gli stranieri che le visitano è che esse presuppongono un popolo di gente competente in fatto di propria cucina. La competenza di cucina è simile alla competenza linguistica di qualcuno che parla la propria lingua madre. Non se ne rende conto, ma nessuno è maestro come lui nel gestire il sistema linguistico dentro cui naviga e nel potervi anche - ma non facilmente - apportare delle innovazioni coerenti col tutto. Sidney Mintz cosi definisce la competenza in fatto di propria cucina «Prendete qualcosa semplice come il pane. In Francia come in Italia il pane è un accompagnamento costante di ogni piatto, e la gente ha un'idea molto chiara di che gusto deve avere. Viene consumato ogni giorno, in pratica con ogni tipo di cibo. Questo non implica che ci sia un solo tipo di pane e che tutti i pani debbano avere lo stesso sapore, o che la gente pensi che dovrebbero averlo. Piuttosto, il (...) pane, come la pasta (...) sono soggetti di sufficiente familiarità e importanza da essere la base di discorsi. Questi soggetti unificano culturalmente le persone; e tendono a far ciò senza una referenza a cose del tipo apparte-nenza ad una classe o ad un'altra, e non hanno a che fare con il tipo di educazione ricevuta. In un certo senso, e questa è la cosa più interes-sante riguardo alla cucina - quando un gruppo umano ne possiede una, sa in che cosa consiste non importa cosa gli venga detto da altri, perché ne ha da sempre mangiato (spesso ne ha da sempre cucinato) per tutta la vita e per questo ne può parlare».

Questa competenza molti di noi, come italiani, sappiamo di averla anche se vien fuori solo nei casi in cui riscon-triamo una anomalia. Ad esempio, un amico tedesco che non vorrei leg-gesse queste righe, una sera h voluto preparare in casa di comuni amici in Italia una pasta che aveva imparato, diceva lui, durante un viaggio negli Stati Uniti. Il risultato è stata una pasta, spaghetti, con sopra fagioli (stufati) e peperoni crudi. Mi sono chiesto per molti giorni a venire perché fossi rimasto seriamente infastidito da questa ricetta e ho scoperto che il tedesco, in qualche modo, presup-poneva che la pasta fosse un sistema aperto e facilmente innovabile, al punto che uno si può inventare nelle infinite variazioni che esistono una variazione in più.

E invece non è così. Primo: perché gli spaghetti non vanno quasi mai con i fagioli, secondo perché la mistione di cotto e crudo è possibile per certi elementi, ma non per altri (il pomodoro può essere crudo in certe paste, ma è difficile che lo siano degli ortaggi tipo melanzane o peperoni). Terzo perché è il sugo derivante dalla commistione fagioli/peperoni che non ha nessun riferimento conosciuto a cui appigliarsi.  Insomma si può anche fare una pasta alla nutella, all'avocado e alle rane, ma fin quando questi elementi non avranno una solida trama di riferimenti a cui appigliarsi il frutto sarà solo un «fuor di luogo», un «fuori tema». Ecco: una cucina pre-suppone un territorio consentito di variazioni e un off-limits  che solo i «parlanti»  quella cucina possono conoscere davvero.
La pasta e la pizza - Franco La Cecla (L'identità italiana, Il Mulino; 1998; pp. 95-96)

In the passage above, Franco suggests that this shared culinary competence unifies Italians regardless of education and class. This is taken up in a truly remarkable podcast series, now in its fourth season, called Denominazione di origine inventata, by Alberto Grandi and Daniele Soffiati. The podcast is an offshoot of a book published in 2018 called Denominazione di origine inventata: Le bugie del marketing sui prodotti tipici italiani, by Alberto Grandi. The title of the book and the podcast is a play on the words demonizione di origine controllata (DOC), issued by various agricultural government bodies that set and oversee the standards of some Italian foods, in particular cheese and wine. In everyday speech we sometimes use DOC, often humorously, to indicate authenticity: è milanese DOC (or doc)! Comunque (anyway), as one can guess from the title of Alberto Grandi's book, and the podcast series, the author(s) set out to challange the history and alleged authenticity of many of our cherished foods and dishes. They do so without malice, which is perhaps why both the book and the podcast were/are so popular and Alberto Grandi's premise is, as he says in an interview to the Swiss Newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung:
Italy prefers to cultivate myths like those about its cuisine, he says. According to him, this «gastro-nationalism» is harming Italy. «The idea that this country can live only off caciotta di Pienza (a type of cheese) or tourism is an illusion. Italy cannot cope with modernity, so it wants to live in a constructed past», he says. (Full article here):   
In the very latest episode of the podcast, the authors interview Lorenzo Luporini, co-author of a new book, Una storia in comune. Perché la cultura pop racconta chi siamo, which explores whether there actually is a "gusto italiano" and, as mentioned earlier, picks up on some of the points made by Franco la Cecla. Ecco il podcast:
Ritornando alla carbonara, you'll find a wonderful book, translated into English, by Luca Cesari, A Brief History of Pasta, dedicated both to the dish under the spotlight, and to many other classic Italian pasta dishes. Here's a passage:
Although it had been around for little more than a decade, by the end of the 1950s carbonara had already established a firm foothold. Its biggest fans were foreigners, especially Americans and the British: not surprisingly, since the bacon-and-egg
pairing seemed natural to them.
Gossip columnists caught all the celebrities of the day digging into bowls of carbonara, which was seen as the most appetising, satisfying, quintessentially Italian - or rather, Roman - thing one could possibly order. Its fans included Gregory Peck, Linda Darnel, Pearl Bailey, Mamie Van Doren, Victor Mature and even the very Italian Sophia Loren. As for Oliver Hardy, they say that "in Rome, while on a publicity trip in 1950, he ate five
dishes of spaghetti alla carbonara in one sitting".

It was an utterly new and up-to-the-minute dish. Above all, one that stuck to your ribs: just what people wanted in the postwar period of rebirth, when they were eager to forget the hunger, hardship and breadlines that were still so vividly impressed on every mind. Rome, in particular, was all abustle with the activity at Cinecittà studios and the constant to and fro of Hollywood stars, as Federico Fellini depicts so well in La Dolce Vita.

The portrait of carbonara that emerges is of a dish explicitly aimed at the other side of the Atlantic. And the courtship was successful. This can be seen from the vast number of recipes printed in the US up to 1960 (at least as many as in Italy) and the ample evidence of its popularity overseas.

If carbonara suddenly began to rise in the ranks of Italy's favourite pasta dishes, it was in part because it embodied the kind of postwar reconstruction that everyone wanted: rich, calorific and English-speaking.
A Brief History of Pasta: The Italian Food that Shaped the World - Luca Cesari (translated by Johanna Bishop; Profile Books; 2022; pp. 83-84)
And in the video below, we find our intrepid author discussing the dish:
If all this talk of la carbonara has made you want to prepare it for dinner there are a billion trillion zillion videos to choose from. Here are a few:
Of course no Roman cuisine cookbook would be complete without la carbonara recipe. Ecco what two of our favourite Roman cuisine books say a proposito della carbonara:
I have eaten a lot of carbonara in Rome in the name of perfecting the recipe, so I hope my larger dress size Is worth it! Some have been too cloying, others are bland, a few tasted of cinnamon (a coating used on some cured meats) and many are served with chewy guanciale, the cured, fatty pork cheek that gives this dish its flavour. The best carbonara in Rome that we found was at Roscioli followed by a close second at Felice in Testaccio. It might be because its a deli and restaurant that Roscioli have the best guanciale - they use unusual crushed peppercorns and bright yellow eggs from corn-fed chickens - but I think it's in their cooking.

Equally perfect bowls of this famous pasta can be made at home with pancetta or good-quality streaky bacon; thickly sliced from a good butcher. Make sure it is fatty and for extra flavour use a tablespoon of rendered pork fat (see page 15). Alessandro Roscioli uses an iron frying pan to crisp up the cubes of guanciale so that they are crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside; they become like the best pork scratchings you have ever munched on, all combined with pasta in a peppery cheese coating. Incidentally, carbonara is named after the carbonari:  the charcoal men who fed themselves on the cured meat, cheese and pasta they carried with them into the forest. Presumably black specks of charcoal gave it extra flavour although now they are re-placed with pepper.
Rome: Centuries in an Italian Kitchen - Katie and Giancarlo Caldesi (Hardie Grant Books; 2015; p.133). To view all of Katie and Giancarlo Caldesi's wonder-ful books, click here.
There isn't a dish debated more in Rome than carbonara. It is to Rome what pizza is to Naples, that is, iconic - and, traditionalists will say, untouch-able. Nowadays you can find many chefs in Rome experimenting with ingredients and often adding a seasonal twist like asparagus or artichokes, but for me, nothing beats the classic. Everyone has an opinion on the matter; ask any Roman about
where to eat a good carbonara and they will tell you only their choice is the best in town.

A few things to note about real-deal Roman carbonara: under no circum-stance does it contain cream. Don't let even the creamiest one you try in the Eternal City mislead you. It's made with crispy guanciale  (cured pork cheek), pecorino cheese and eggs. In Rome, it is unlike any carbo-nara you'll taste elsewhere, but recreating it at home is easy, with a lot of practice. The difference between a smooth one, and scrambled egg on pasta, is merely a matter of seconds. In fact, a chef once told me, "Carbonara is a lot like life. If you're not watching closely, you'll screw it up!" This recipe is from my favourite trattoria in Trastevere, Da Enzo al 29. Their version rarely disap-points, because it has just the right amount of saltiness and is decadently silky.
I Heart Rome: Recipes & Stories from the Etrernal City - Maria Pasquale; photography by Andrea Federici and Giorgia Nofrini; designer: Murray Batten (Smith Street Books; 2017; p. 23). To view all of Maria Pasquale's truly wonderful books, click here. (Aprile, 2025)