SC - pasta carbonara

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Michael Macchione wrote:
> 
> I stopped on the Food Network, as
> a show (Taste with David Rosegarten ??), was starting on Pasta Carbonara.
> It turns out that the recipe I had posted was amazingly close to the
> recipe that he prepared, and that adding cream to a carbonara sauce was an
> american addition.

Yeah, Americans tend to have a thing about homogeneity and generally
don't like even a smidgen of undercooked egg on their pasta, which
pretty well limits the effectiveness of eggs as a sauce. The American
version, made with cream, is more or less a stirred custard with onions,
bacon, and cheese.

The Italian dish, in its simplest form, is made with a mixture of olive
oil and rendered fat from pancetta (an unsmoked bacon), or cured hog
jowl, whose name in Italian I have forgotten, with onions, garlic,
cheese, and egg. And, of course, pasta. The idea is that it is easy to
carry the ingredients in the field and can, in a pinch, be made in one
pot. Supposedly it is named for charcoal burners, one of them being the
inventor.
 
> Unfortunately, he gave some history to this sauce,
> and although he had a few possibilities for the origin of this dish, none
> of them came close to being in period.  The earliest seemed to be 1850's
> or so.  One of them was that some GI's after WW II brought some eggs and
> bacon to some Italians and asked them to make something from them.

There are far too many of these "American G.I." stories for them all to
be true. Italian-Americans have been committing what Italian natives
have regarded as culinary sacrilege since long before the Second World
War.
 
> SO I finally got an answer, the dish is dreadfully out of period....
> although its still delicious.

Not necessarily. There are probably pasta dishes very close to it that
existed in period. Platina often dresses pasta with a mixture of
rendered pork fat and cheese. There are Greek pasta dishes topped with
egg. While I can't say that the dish existed in any recognizable form in
period, there's no reason to categorically say  it didn't, either.

Adamantius
______________________________________
Phil & Susan Troy
troy at asan.com
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