If My Grandmother Had Wheels

Pasta, Pecorino & Propaganda: The Strange & Furious Invention of Roman Carbonara

Carbonara is an inconvenient truth in the annals of Italian food lore. Exported around the world in its now-sacrosanct four-ingredient straitjacket, its modern defenders would have you believe it’s as ancient a Roman creation as aqueducts and calendars. Which is curious, because if it were really so ancient and sacred, you’d think someone might have written it down before 1950. But they didn’t. Not a recipe, not a whisper. 

As you know, carbonara is a creamy pasta, made without cream and with guanciale (cured pork cheek), pecorino cheese, egg yolks, and black pepper. You will know this because you will have been told it by an Italian TV chef in a tight T-shirt or by a friend who likes cooking enough to watch carbonara recipes on YouTube and recite the 4-ingredient mantra knowingly. I used to be that friend. I used to be the one in the tight T-shirt. In fact, I once made those YouTube videos. And then I got curious and asked the questions that you never ask when dealing with traditional dishes. Where did that come from? How did it get here? Why do they make it like that?

The first thing you realise when you start asking questions is that for a dish so loudly defended, it arrived suspiciously late to the party. The simple fact is, there is no written record of a dish called ‘carbonara’ in Italy before 1950. Or anywhere else in the world for that matter. Food historians' best theory is that at the end of the Second World War, Rome, destitute and impoverished from two decades of totalitarian fascism and military defeat from the Allied forces, was liberated by American GI’s. The hungry inhabitants of the city combined the bacon and eggs from their ration packs with pasta to make the earliest, rudimentary versions of carbonara. 

The name carbonara first appears in print in a 1950 article in La Stampa, describing a dish requested by American soldiers in the Trastevere neighbourhood of Rome. By the mid 1950’s, the dish had begun to take hold, partly because that combination of ingredients is tasty and partly as a symbol of Italian liberation, and the earliest recipes began to appear. The first written recipe for the dish is from a Chicago newspaper in 1952, presumably by way of a returning soldier. At this point, and for a long time afterwards, the dish was still loose in its conception, an idea rather than a set of rules (which is really what all traditional cooking is).

The first carbonara recipe published in Italian comes from the August 1954 edition of La Cucina Italiana and is made with pancetta, gruyere cheese and garlic. Read that again, take a deep breath and remember that I am reporting fact, not opinion. My favourite thing about this recipe is that when Jamie Oliver uses parmesan instead of pecorino and purists go blue in the face screaming for a return to tradition, this is what they are screaming for. 

The August 1954 edition of La Cucina Italiana - the first Italian recipe for a carbonara

Throughout the 50’s and 60’s, both Italian and English language recipes, from authoritative authors of the time like Ada Boni and Elizabeth David, used ingredients like pancetta, garlic, parsley, white wine, cream and butter, all considered sacrilege by today’s standards. Looking at recipes from this period, it’s interesting to see a timeline of when different ingredients were added and removed. 

I had always assumed that the ‘original’ carbonara was made with guanciale and pecorino and that pancetta and parmesan were suggested later as accessible alternatives, particularly outside of Italy. Not so. In fact, it’s almost the reverse. There isn’t a single recipe pre-1965 that uses pecorino. Indeed with the exception of La Cucina Italiana’s Gruyere (lol), they all use parmesan. Also until 1965, all recipes use only whole eggs and, with a couple of exceptions, pancetta. 

The first use of guanciale comes from La grande Cucina by Luigi Carnacina published in 1960. This is also the first time carbonara is included in a truly significant Italian cookbook. This work is the legendary Roman gastronome’s magnum opus, a monster of a volume which includes almost 4000 recipes, colour illustrations and techniques. Fantastically, this very same recipe that introduces guanciale to the dish is also the first to ever use cream. It’s like composing Beethoven’s Fifth and then playing it entirely on kazoos.

I won’t trudge you through each iteration of carbonara in turn, but it is worth touching on Adi Boni’s 1964 contribution which wedges the dish firmly between a rock and hard place. On one hand you have the doyenne of Roman cookery writing, Ada Boni, and on the other you have her recipe, resplendent with whole eggs, pancetta, butter, parmesan, onion, parsley and white wine. It’s like Delia Smith writing the definitive recipe for shepherd’s pie using tofu and turmeric. It’s Fergus Henderson declaring that black pudding is best poached in almond milk. Escoffier insisting boeuf bourguignon be finished with a tin of baked beans. That’s where we are.

Ada Boni’s 1964 recipe for Carbonara from Il Talismano Della Felicità

Until the 1990’s you find much of the same; combinations of olive oil, butter, cream, garlic and white wine continue to be ubiquitous both in Italy and abroad. At the same time, reading concurrent recipes over these 30 years reveals some gradual shifts taking place. Pancetta becomes pancetta o guanciale becomes guanciale o pancetta. Parmigiano becomes parmigiano o pecorino becomes pecorino e parmigiano and sometimes just pecorino. Egg yolks begin to take favour over whole eggs. Black pepper, which earlier is either not mentioned at all or not quantified beyond ‘season with salt and pepper’ becomes ‘abbondante’ as its flavour is asserted. 

These writers weren’t breaking a tradition, they were forming one. Gradually throughout the 70’s and 80’s, and increasingly in the 90’s, the dish was honed to a precise combination of flavours and textures and those ingredients considered superfluous were stripped away. Butter was presumably too French. Pancetta was too easy to find. The dish was boiled down to its four approved relics - yolks, pecorino, guanciale, pepper -  and anything else became a sin. Cream, of course, became the Antichrist.

Through a process of Culinary Darwinism, the dish was refined and codified into its current form and given a retroactive authenticity. This is a perfect example of how quickly food traditions can solidify. Despite not taking its hewn-in-stone final form until much later, already by the 1970s it was treated as a ‘classic’ Roman dish, despite being younger than The Beatles. Does that make it less ‘authentic’? Not necessarily, it just means authenticity is a story we tell, not a fixed truth. 

Today, carbonara has achieved full martyrdom. It’s not possible for someone to cook it in the public realm without attracting furious, unsolicited advice from a ninteen-year-old on TikTok who learned everything he knows from the r/ItalianFood subreddit and the back of his dad’s Fiat. Depending how much time you spend on food social media, you may or may not know the phenomenon I’m referring to.

To give you a flavour of this anger, this wild-eyed, vein-throbbing rage, scroll beneath any YouTube video or Instagram reel where some unfortunate dolt has dared to make carbonara with cream, or God help them, garlic, and you’ll find a digital Pompeii of fury. There are threats, insults and philosophical denunciations. One moment you’re whisking eggs, the next you’re being accused of culinary genocide by a man named Fabio whose grandma is now spinning like a shawarma in her grave. They speak in absolutes, as if the EU passed a directive sometime around 2003 mandating pecorino or death. This treatment is not reserved for foreigners either. Below are comments from this video of Italian 3 Michelin-starred chef Mauro Ulliasi making a carbonara, in which he dares to fry the guanciale in oil first flavoured with onion.

@luca82lupo82 (7 years ago):CLASSIC MY ASS… CARBONARA IS MADE WITH WHOLE EGG, PECORINO, AND GUANCIALE, PERIOD. GARLIC AND OIL HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT DAMN IT

@andreadifrancesco3460 (6 years ago):Garlic no, and parmesan no, absolutely not!!! Take his star away immediately!

@michelepiserchia1403 (4 years ago):Great spaghetti aglio e olio, just one question: why didn’t he add chili pepper?

Excited to find out where this shared national furor comes from, I asked my friend Fiorenza if Italians undertake some kind of training, perhaps in early education, which instills the doctrine of carbonara and ignites the desire to go forth into the world and right its wrongs; a kind of Jehovah's Witnesses of pecorino and pork cheek. Her answer was less exciting but far more logical. It’s the result of the right dish in the right place at the right time. This extract is taken from her fantastic essay on ‘Modular Cuisine and the Death of Taste’ which I will perhaps publish here for you all at a later date, with her permission. 

“From 2012 on, when the Instagram gods had not granted us the ‘stories’ function which now allows us to differentiate between high and low commitment content yet, food was casually everywhere on our feeds. Ugly food, pretty food, home-made food, takeout food, bad food, sometimes even half-eaten food. The 2016-2019 era of perfectly curated IG posts wiped out this habit in its original form from individual profiles, to favour a food-as-lifestyle-indicator type of content. What remained fully unchanged from that era is numerous outlets telling food stories, among which sat the ones that defined themselves as “foodporn”.

Many of these projects started with the goal of being a platform for local food spots and their unique creations, particularly in Napoli, until the social media engagement patterns started dictating the product development strategy. This type of food responds to the same rules as American modular cuisine but with Italian ingredients – everything pistachio, everything carbonara, everything bueno.”

This is the last part of the story which brings us to the present day. Youtube was already awash with carbonara recipe tutorials and ‘wrong’ versions of the dish from celebrity chefs, complete with reaction videos from their Roman contemporaries. With the digital dogma already solidified, the surge of the now canonised carbonara was primed to spread via social media, initially via pages like napolifoodporn (in-between bursting balls of deep-fried burrata) and thereafter on those certain kind of shiny polished influencer pages like this and this that do sort of a bit of everything from burgers to tacos to pasta.

Combine this with the ‘memeification’ of faux Italian outrage of things like breaking spaghetti or, in this case, making carbonara with pancetta, and you have the perfect storm. In fact if you’re looking to go viral, you can’t go wrong with a carbonara. If you stray out of line, you get lots of engagement (see above), and if you stick to the formula, you get lots of engagement - comments of ‘bravo’ and clapping emojis from accounts called things like EmilioEats and PastaPapa74. Whatever floats your boat.

So here’s a quick recap of a tradition forming in real time:

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1950s: The name carbonara appears in print for the first time in La Stampa, 1950.

1952: A recipe appears in a Chicago newspaper, showing its early American reach.

1954–1960s: Carbonara starts appearing in Italian cookbooks (Il Talismano, etc.), but it’s still evolving. Garlic, cream, parsley, white wine and pancetta all show up repeatedly.

1970s: It gains steady traction both inside and outside Italy, often as a rich, creamy pasta, but still lacks the strict identity we associate with it now.

1990s: This is when carbonara becomes famous as the Roman pasta. Guidebooks start to describe it as a staple. Italian restaurants abroad list it proudly, and it starts being fetishised as one of ‘the four Roman pastas’ (even though that idea only congeals in the 2000s).

2000s: The Four Roman Pastas concept (carbonara, amatriciana, gricia, cacio e pepe) becomes canonised in food media. By the mid-2000s, food blogs, forums, and early YouTube channels elevate carbonara and these other dishes to a sacred tradition.

2010s - Present: Social media and food influencers turn carbonara into both a status dish and a cultural minefield. Buzzfeed, Bon Appétit, and celebrity chefs post ‘wrong’ versions, prompting furious backlash, especially from Italians online. This is when the “four ingredients only” rule becomes sacrosanct. 

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And here we are. The purpose of all this is not to refute that it’s a great dish, or that food traditions are not worth protecting, but simply to examine how quickly those traditions can be formed and solidified. What a generation before had merely been a loose concept for cheesy pasta with eggs and bacon, now elicits reactions like a man trying to pass a kidney stone and recite Dante at the same time.

But ultimately, carbonara is not special because it’s old or sacred; it’s special because it’s good. It has evolved to become good, and that’s what I was really interested in. We accept evolution so willingly elsewhere, in fashion, in music, in film. Indeed, in almost every other facet of life, we accept evolution for what it is: inevitable. We don’t yearn for the return of top hats and outdoor toilets (unless you’re Jacob Rees-Mogg), but something about food, especially Italian food, is desperate to be old and unchanged, as if it just appeared one day and has never strayed, but that’s not how things work, even carbonara. It doesn’t need a backstory of ancient shepherds or coal miners. It doesn’t need myth. It needs salt, fat, starch, and timing. Authenticity is a lovely story, but stories change. Recipes change. The only thing that doesn’t change is the self-righteous certainty of the people who shout about them online.

Thanks for reading. Enough history for now - see you next week for some recipes.

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If you’re interested in more writing on Italian food history, I would recommend some of the sources I looked at whilst writing this article. Chewing The Fat - An Oral History of Italian Foodways by Karima Moyer-Nocchi is a brilliant book based on a series of interviews with Italian women in their 90’s who grew up cooking in fascist era Italy. In the process, she unpacks some of the the myths of Italian culinary tradition, many of which were formed in the 1960’s economic boom and ‘dolce vita’ era.

The work of Luca Cesari and Alberto Grandi who both write about the history of Italian gastronomy, in particular the origins and stories around the most famous dishes from Italian cuisine.