Four first courses today give Rome its reputation as a stronghold of Italian pasta: cacio e pepe, gricia, amatriciana, and the most famous of them all, the legendary carbonara. A closer look at their recipes immediately reveals their simplicity — a quality universally acknowledged — as well as their archaic character, inherited from an older gastronomic tradition. Three out of four (the exception being amatriciana) are pasta in bianco, that is, without tomato. Indeed, cacio e pepe is quite simply pasta with cheese, a centuries-old recipe from which butter has been removed. Yet the most archaic and defining feature they share is the use of pork fat as the primary seasoning.
Lard, in particular, was the dominant cooking fat of Neapolitan cuisine, which from the mid-nineteenth century created and spread modern Italian pasta. These were therefore pasta dishes prepared without olive oil — the seasoning of fasting days (Fridays and Lent) — and even more so without butter, which was regarded as the fat of aristocratic cooking. The expansion of this new Italo-Neapolitan cuisine consequently led to the spread of pasta dressed with pork fat throughout central Italy — Abruzzo, the Marche, and Umbria — regions that had long been closely connected to Rome. The earliest Roman cookbook we have, dating back to 1927, is La cucina romana by Ada Boni. Throughout the book, lard reigns supreme, from first courses to desserts. Pancetta is never mentioned, and guanciale appears in only ten out of 223 recipes..
In these latter recipes, moreover, eight out of ten used guanciale together with lard, which produced an unnecessary excess of fat, showing uncertainty about how to handle it properly: as if it were an ingredient of recent origin and not Roman. The guanciale production area, which had been very active since the early 19th century, was in fact the Apennine region between Lazio, Abruzzo, Umbria, and Marche, with Amatrice and Campotosto at its center. It is no coincidence, then, that the only two first courses in the 1927 Roman cookbook that use guanciale as a condiment have a reference to that geographical region in their names: la matriciana derives from Amatrice, a town that now belongs to Lazio but was part of Abruzzo until 1927, while la gricia is listed as pasta alla marchiciana.
Guanciale (called barbozza in Umbria) is a cured meat with a high fat content, 70%, while the rest is a significant amount of lean meat.
It therefore had several advantages: it could be stored for a long time thanks to the curing process, unlike lard, which did not keep for long; it produced enough liquid for frying and seasoning; and, above all, it contained pieces of meat that greatly enriched its flavor.
Carbonara was not mentioned in the 1927 cookbook, perhaps because the recipe was still in its infancy or simply little known, but I believe the real reason was another: the author, who was an avowed proponent of Roman gastronomic orthodoxy, may have excluded it as foreign, because carbonara appeared to be a variation of a famous Neapolitan first course, pasta cacio e ova, seasoned with lard. Replacing the latter, in fact, the guanciale of the “gricia marchiciana” in combination with Neapolitan egg and cheese created that important mutation that would be called carbonara. The encounter took place outside Rome. The first description we have of it is that reported in 1931 by the Touring Club's Guida gastronomica d'Italia (Gastronomic Guide to Italy), Umbria section, and it was called strascinati di Cascia. Compared to the current Roman carbonara, it contained variations of fresh egg pasta in the form of maccheroncini forati, whole eggs, and sausage together with pancetta, which was called “grasso e magro” (fat and lean) in the Umbrian manner.
Cascia was, among other things,a tourist town, since 1925 a destination for organized pilgrimages by Romans devoted to Saint Rita. Most likely, the groups greatly appreciated this enriched version of the new dish and took back fond memories of it to Rome.
The recipe obtained the rare privilege, which it shares with few other icons of Italianness such as tortellini and pizza margherita, of having its own founding myth: a legend about its origins, as if people were aware of its importance and that their recipe would go down in the history of taste. However, the story of its birth was set elsewhere, in a nearby village of charcoal burners: in Monteleone di Spoleto, the highest municipality in Umbria. It says that, at the end of the 15th century, a woman from Monteleone managed to secure the release of the men of her village by delighting the occupying enemy with magnificently seasoned penchi. Yes, indeed! Because the legend actually referred to another type of pasta: penchi, which were, and still are, pappardelle just under two centimeters wide, unequivocally seasoned in the story with guanciale, sausage, and pecorino cheese; unlike the use in Cascia reported by the Touring guide, which combines pancetta with a generic “cheese.”
Monteleone was home to three different types of charcoal burners: the first was the traditional type that produced charcoal in the Valnerina, burning wood from trees felled in their mountains; the second was that of the miners who extracted lignite (coal) from the nearby deposit of Pian di Ruscio, and the third was that of the Monteleonesi who emigrated to Rome, most of whom opened coal shops and were therefore called carbonari by the Romans. One family of these “carbonari,” the Ciampini family from Monteleone, also opened the Tre Scalini restaurant in the central Piazza Navona in 1946. These emigrant carbonari are therefore the most important for our purposes, because they were the protagonists of the export of the recipe to the capital.
The name carbonara, which is now given to pasta with cheese and eggs with the addition of pork, was first recorded in Rome in 1951. It was clearly a name created by people outside its environment of origin, by Romans who had come to know and appreciate it and who associated it with the social group from which it originated. In the same way that they called artichokes alla giudia, the fried artichokes of the ghetto.
The Umbrian dish, in its Romanization, had lost its appearance as a hearty and luxurious single dish with the addition of sausage, becoming a more sober first course, modeled on the other two Roman first courses that already existed made with guanciale alone: gricia and matriciana.
The success of carbonara in the immediate post-war period must have been enthusiastic for it to spread so quickly: the following year, in 1952, the menu of the Italian-American restaurant Armando's in Chicago, run by two men from Lucca, included it, using pancetta instead of guanciale and Parmesan instead of pecorino, but the flat shape of the pasta was very similar to the original penchi, and the portions were still those of mine workers (170 grams of pasta per person). We have seen that carbonara was not the invention of a single person, but a collective creation, and this necessarily meant that there could be no original version. As in any evolution, the path was marked by many experiments, some of which failed, until the selection of characteristics led to the creation of today's definitive version, considered the best, the “authentic” recipe.
There may certainly be several legitimate versions of the same recipe, but they must all respect its internal logic, its consistent structure, its DNA.
The DNA of carbonara consists of four elements: pork fat, pork, eggs, and aged pecorino cheese. These are the fundamentals of its nature that cannot be replaced or altered; secondary details, on the other hand, can vary without turning it into another recipe. Whether it is fresh or dried pasta, whether onion or white vinegar is added, these are examples of minor personal modifications that do not change the nature of the dish.
The addition of extra pork, such as sausage in the Umbrian versions, does not alter it at all. The addition or prevalence of other fats, such as olive oil, milk, or cream, are superfluous and disruptive alterations to its nature and taste.
Let us now consider the two variations that are most debated today, namely those with pancetta and/or Parmesan cheese.
We have already seen that pancetta was not used at all in Roman cuisine, but carbonara, despite having been Romanized by popular demand, retains its autonomous structure. The recipe requires fat and meat. Rolled or flat pancetta does not have enough fat to sauté the pasta and at the same time provide the liquid to add to the carbocrema (50% of its weight for rolled pancetta, much less for flat pancetta). It cannot therefore replace guanciale, which is 70% fat, and, if used, must always be cooked in combination with another food, such as fresh sausage, which in Umbria provides another 30% of fat for cooking.
The presence of pancetta can therefore correspond to an acceptable requirement: that of adding more meat to the recipe, a function that it can fulfill excellently; so pancetta yes, if you like, but with guanciale or other pork fat.
As for the aged cheese to be used, many people rightly dislike Pecorino Romano, but the problem is not that it is made from sheep's milk. On the contrary: they dislike it because all the wonderful flavors of sheep's milk are not noticeable, they are obscured and canceled out by an absurd amount of salt.
Five percent of the weight of this cheese is salt, so the need to replace it with something else is real and legitimate.
The choice most consistent with the nature and history of this non-Roman recipe is to replace it with a pecorino cheese from the area where it originated, such as pecorino di Norcia, which has a fantastic flavor and half the salt content of the Roman variety.
Once the problem caused by Pecorino Romano cheese had been solved, the use of Parmesan, a non-local and globalized cow's milk cheese, would only be a useless alteration of the recipe and its flavors, based on typical foods from central Italy. Of all the expressions of culture, food is perhaps the one most closely linked to the human, natural, and economic environment that surrounds it.
Recipes, therefore, in addition to having internal material and logical consistency, also have an identity link with the outside world, a link that we call tradition.
The fixity that distinguishes it becomes for us, in the whirlwind of change, a possibility, a portal that gives us access to another place in space and time, to worlds and lives that have disappeared.