The Mysterious Origins of Italy’s Most Fought-Over Pasta

Browsing the web, you'll run across many cooking sites offering the "original" recipe for carbonara. They flood you with hundreds of tips, but almost all focus on the three ingredients considered canonical: eggs, guanciale and pecorino, plus an abundant sprinkling of pepper.

Many also seem to enjoy narrowing the field even further. The guanciale has to be from Amatrice (because carbonara and amatriciana, as we know, are kissing cousins); the pecorino has to be black rind pecorino romano; the eggs have to be one per person (some use them whole, others just the yolk) plus one "for the bowl"; pepper is something everyone can agree on, but it has to be ground on the spot. Cooks, food bloggers and ordinary pasta lovers, united by a single recipe, speak with one voice in defense of tradition.

With carbonara, as with the other dishes described in my book The Discovery of Pasta: A History in Ten Dishes, history and legend intertwine and their boundaries become blurred. There are no old written records to cite, so some people swear that their great-grandmother was already making carbonara in the early 1900s. Others have heard that it's named after the Carbonari: back in the nineteenth century, Roman members of this secret revolutionary society would request the dish as their last meal before the infamous executioner Mastro Titta deprived them of their heads.

But maybe there's a different story behind carbonara. And maybe it tells us more about our new globalized world than the peasant one of legend, however hard it may be to dispense with the bits of myth that embellish this unique and special recipe.

The invention of carbonara is a widely debated topic, and the absence of any written record of the dish in the first half of the twentieth century makes it even more contentious. In any case, there seem to be no reliable sources pointing to its existence until the 1950s.

At the very dawn of that decade, on 26 July 1950, the first reference turns up in the Turin-based newspaper La Stampa, in an article titled "Il Papa ha “passato ponte'" ("Pope Pays a Visit 'Across the Bridge'"). Describing the Trastevere district of Rome, the journalist mentions a restaurant, Da Cesaretto alla Cisterna, which had apparently built a reputation years before as a place where American officers could find spaghetti alla carbonara.

In the same year we find a reference to carbonara in Lunga vita di Trilussa, Mario dell'Arco's biography of a famous Roman dialect poet: "Our hero almost never attacked a dish of spaghetti 'alla carbonara' or 'alla carrettiera' without the aid of two or three equally gluttonous friends. Epigrams seemed to come to him more easily over a steak (he ate at Dal Bolognese in Piazza del Popolo)."

Current research suggests that these were the first instances in which carbonara sauce was mentioned anywhere. All are closely linked to Rome: no recipes had yet been printed, but the dish must have been well known by that point in the capital, at least.

For some clue of what carbonara was like early on, we have to wait until 1952, when the first recipe was finally published.

The place it turns up is disconcerting, to say the least. It's not in Rome, as one might expect, but rather in the United States. More specifically, in an illustrated guide to Chicago restaurants, by Patricia Bronté, titled Vittles and Vice: An Extraordinary Guide to What's Cooking on Chicago's Near North Side. The book describes various establishments in this neighborhood, including one, Armando's, that served carbonara..

The story of carbonara – and this is why it's so fascinating to reconstruct – was thus intercontinental from day one, a factor that would play a pivotal role in its rise to fame.

Although it had yet to settle on one form and 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 appetizing, satisfying, quintessentially Italian – or rather, Roman – thing one could possibly order.

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 favorite pasta dishes, it was in part because it embodied the kind of postwar reconstruction that everyone wanted: rich, calorific and English-speaking.

And nowadays? In this new millennium, carbonara has reached a level of fame that places it in the pantheon of great Italian recipes, or rather, great international recipes.

From the outset, carbonara has lacked a backstory. A long, noble pedigree, for instance: there was no ancient tradition or medieval manuscript to cite. Moreover, the degree to which the ingredients varied over its first half-century of existence didn't help with the task of giving it a firm identity.

Much of the speculation about this recipe's origins is inspired by a perplexing problem: to this day, no one has been able to convincingly explain where the name "carbonara" comes from. The theories most often encountered revolve around three possible derivations: the Carbonari, charcoal burners or the color of the dish.

Let's start with the first hypothesis, that it could be linked to the Carbonari. This secret society was initially formed in the early nineteenth century to oppose Napoleonic rule in Italy, and its activities came to a definitive end in the mid-1800s. Although in this very period a number of cookbooks were printed in and around Naples – where the underground network got its start, and where, as we have seen, the first cheese-and-egg pastas were also invented – none of them use the term "alla carbonara" in any recipe title. Unless the Carbonari were also masters at covering their culinary tracks and diligently hiding the secret of carbonara, it would be odd for the name to exist yet never be recorded, in an era when food writing was in full flower.

Then there's the second theory, centered on charcoal burners: laborers from the lowest rungs of society who were forced to go up into the mountains for months at a stretch, often with their families in tow, to gather wood and transform it into charcoal.

This ancient, grueling job began to disappear in the twentieth century with the advent of modern fuels. Little or nothing is known about the eating habits of these workers, and we can be certain that by the 1950s, when carbonara made its first appearance, the profession was well on its way to extinction. The idea of a centuries-long culinary tradition, handed down by generations of charcoal burners in Umbria or Lazio, is romantic but implausible. Sadly, it is very difficult to imagine nineteeth-century charcoal burners consuming anything but a monotonous diet of bread and polenta – and certainly not spaghetti: pasta, contrary to what one might think today, only recently took on the connotation of a cheap, popular food.

Finally, there is the idea that the name comes from the color of the pasta, black as "a charcoal burner's face." The first to venture this imaginative comparison was Carlo Scorza, who suggested in 1958 that one of the original ingredients might have been squid ink, quickly replaced by egg yolk. "Imaginative," as I said. There are obviously no recipes or descriptions out there to back this up.

Another chromatic explanation is based on the amount of pepper employed, the notion being that the spaghetti is literally black with the stuff. But none of the early recipes emphasizes any such abundance of pepper, which sometimes isn't even listed among the ingredients. It's clearly a stretch to associate the color of carbonara – which is mainly yellow from the eggs – with the blackness of coal, no matter how much pepper is added.

There are other, less common theories. Sometimes they mention an unidentified Roman trattoria where "carbonai" (in this case, door-to-door coal peddlers) used to gather, and where, according to legend, this unusual dish could be sampled. If the place really existed, maybe even with a name referring to coal, the mystery would be solved. But as we saw before with "spaghetti al Moro" or "fettuccine Alfredo," these names don't tend to escape the notice of cooks, historians and foodies. Alas, there seems to be no trace of any such restaurant.

Another less frequent hypothesis is that it came from "carbonata," a term often encountered in recipe books, from the 1400s all the way to the mid-twentieth century. This was a method of cooking meat that got its name from the glowing embers on which the pan or grill was placed. It was most commonly used in reference to mutton, beef, or veal; pork, too, at times, but not with anything approaching the same frequency. So although the influence of this word cannot be ruled out, it seems improbable.

There are at least two other theories, even less well known, but more plausible. The first is based on a previous use of the term "alla carbonara" to describe a polenta recipe in Giulia Lazzari-Turco's Manuale pratico di cucina from 1904. Her "Polenta alla carbonara" called for adding a range of ingredients to the mixture of water and ground maize: butter, beans and parmesan, or cheese and cubes of salami or ham. There is unquestionably a similarity in the combination of cheese and cured meat, and Alberto Capatti may be right to say that "the reference to charcoal burners probably suggests a mishmash of affordable ingredients, varying in kind and proportion, but also the plain, natural tastes of people used to eating outdoors." Still, the idea that this affinity between the two recipes meant that the name of the polenta dish was extended to the new spaghetti sauce as well remains rather unlikely.

Except for this first appearance, the vague name "alla carbonara" was so uncommon that the recipe cited above is the only known precedent in print.

Another theory is based on the idea that the dish was invented in Rome at the end of World War II, using eggs and bacon from US army rations. These two products, fresh or tinned, were obviously not easy for Italians to come by, given the rationing then in force and the extreme difficulty of procuring even the bare minimum for survival. The troops that liberated the city were instead well supplied, so as always happens in such situations, these foods began to circulate on the borsa nera, the black market. The same sense of humor that led Romans to call illegal traders "borsari neri" (a pun on Emilio Salgari's Corsaro Nero series of adventure novels) could have led to this name for carbonara, since the ingredients were secretly procured on a market as black as coal.

The hypotheses listed above are obviously just that – hypotheses, plausible or not – and given the total absence of solid facts they are also hard to prove wrong. Until more evidence emerges about the origin of this mysterious name, we're all free to let our imaginations run wild.

So what was the real story? We don't know and perhaps never will. The most likely theory is still that carbonara originated upon the arrival of the Allies in 1944, when some cook in a Roman restaurant made a virtue of necessity and a new pasta sauce out of army rations, by combining them with local ingredients.

What we do know is that carbonara definitively enshrined the encounter of two worlds by merging two different, complementary culinary concepts in one recipe.

In short, to trace the recipe back through time we have to sidestep various "impostors" to arrive at the "authentic" version used by those shepherds, and who knows, maybe even those charcoal burners.

A terrible doubt creeps in.

What if there is no original recipe? Or rather, what if no one ever wrote it down?

In that case, Italians will say, it ought to be easy enough to reconstruct. After all, the few animal foods in our ancestors' diet were from the livestock they raised at home: cured pork from the pig, cheese from the sheep and eggs fresh from the coop. And spaghetti? Well, that was always around, we're talking about Italy. The ingredients were all there, they just had to be put together, simple as that.

Excerpted with permission from The Discovery of Pasta: A History in Ten Dishes by Luca Cesariis. Published by Pegasus Books.

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