This is in response to a post I saw here (I think!) about how one of the first Carbonara recipes was documented in the 80s and also used Gruyère. I’m not too dogmatic about the way recipes should be done and am aware that different regions/countries have different ingredients readily available and this will influence how recipes change, which is really interesting and cool. Anyway I got this old (British) Italian Food cookbook from the 60s (first published in the 50s) which has a very familiar Carbonara recipe. Enjoy!
by blueredyellowgreen20
9 Comments
the gruyere recipe i think you are referring to is from the 1950s ( cucina italiana
https://www.lacucinaitaliana.com/amp/italian-food/how-to-cook/carbonara-how-we-did-it-in-50s)
elisabeth david is the julia child/ marcella hazan of britain
reporting recipes from italy and the south of france in the 1950s
note also that the other recipe is for amatriciana which is ‘not supposed to have onion’ but does in this older recipe book
( and of course it did in traditional recipes)
https://www.gamberorosso.it/notizie/storie/amatriciana-con-cipolla-o-senza-diatriba/
That is quite a find (the book). Carbonara evolved a lot in the past years 🙂
Maybe it would be a little more authentic if it was in Italian and from an Italian (even better, roman) author.
Elizabeth David may have just adapted the recipe.
This goes to show how long people from other nations have been getting Italian recipes wrong tbh.
It’s a British book, not an authentic Italian one so it’s not really a surprise to see it gets it wrong
Well, it’s closer to a [British Carbonara ](https://youtu.be/ZcDpg-6D9VI?si=W-MSruD3Y1W2WjVd)
In the 1989 Gualtiero Marchesi, a master italian chef, add cream (250 ml) in the carbonara (400 g of pasta).
It gets pretty much everything wrong. Ham? bacon? coppa? “slightly granulated appearance” of the eggs? This might be some shitty british dish not roman carbonara
The main problem here is that many people think that we Italians eat carbonara every day or almost…
Carbonara is a traditional Roman dish, in most of the peninsula it was not made or if it was made it was completely different from the traditional recipe (and even the traditional recipe has changed over the years)… Imagine what you can find in a book from the 60s that is not even Italian.
If you want to make a traditional dish that we actually eat and that everyone in Italy make you should make pasta al pomodoro (or pasta al sugo). This is really something that I make almost everyday and that you can call traditional for all Italy.
Carbonara is just a trend… it’s not even that good compared to the other traditional roman pasta like amatriciana. Carbonara is something that you make 2-3 times, enjoy it once and after that you will forget about it… There are so many pasta dish that are just better in Italy.
The main reason carbonara is not made often is not even the taste… it is that it only use egg yolks so you will need to freeze egg whites (or use them, or even worst waste them), and it is only good if you eat it right away. And you will also need guanciale/pancetta that will release a lot of fat… you can eat all of it (that’s when you will understand why you cannot eat carbonara often) or you can save a lot of it to make piadine (for example)…
So while pasta al sugo is a dish where you just cook and eat, carbonara is a thing that will produce a lot of other things that you will need to use. While pasta al sugo is a light dish, carbonara is heavy.
Stop wasting time on carbonara.