Is carbonara actually a recipe american ? This is what the historian says culinary Alberto Grandi in an article published on March 23 in the Financial Timesrelays Slate. According to him, the famous pasta dish was invented by Americans who lived in Italy shortly after World War II.
A revelation that does not lack salt, especially since the Italian government had announced the same day the candidacy of to cook UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage. Since then, our neighbors have been in turmoil. “We can’t talk about anything else anymore,” an Italian told journalist Anna Bressanin, who investigated for the BBC.
A “surreal attack”
Social networks ignited in a few days, the Italian agricultural association Coldiretti denouncing, for example, a “surreal attack”. Relayed by Slate, the specialist journalist Eleonora Cozzella, who wrote the book The perfect carbonara and covered six times the Day of the carbonara (celebrated on April 6), for its part appeased the spirits by evoking a “combination between Italian genius and American resources”.
According to her, American soldiers were regularly fed by innkeepers in the Roman district of Trastevere in the second half of the 1940s. They were particularly fond of this pasta dish which they called the “spaghetti breakfast”, composed at the time of egg powder from the UK and bacon imported from the USA, mixed with pasta.
Parsley and gruyere
In 1952, the first official recipe for pasta carbonara was reportedly published in an American book titled Vittles and vice : an extraordinary guide to what’s cooking on Chicago’s Near North Side. Its author, Patricia Bronté, quotes the Italian restaurant Armando and its two chefs, Armando Lorenzini and Pietro Lencioni, delivering the recipe for their signature dish, which would therefore have been born in the United States.
On our side of the Atlantic, the first carbonara pasta recipe was published in Italian in 1954, in the magazine The Italian kitchen. Problem: it then contained parsley and Gruyère. Information that could again offend the sensibilities of our neighbors and fuel bitter debates on social networks, the traditional carbonara recipe being, as everyone knows, devoid of these two ingredients.
