Eggs, cheese, pork and pepper – and the cream is a foreign invention that Italians find genuinely upsetting
Carbobar holds a 4.8 from two hundred and one reviews, charges ten to twenty pounds, and the dish in the name has no cream in it.
None. It never did.
What is actually in it
Four things.
Egg. Cheese – pecorino, which is sheep’s milk, and hard, and salty. Cured pork – properly guanciale, which is cheek, not bacon and not pancetta. And black pepper, in quantity.
And pasta, and its water.
That is the entire recipe.
The sauce is an emulsion
Which is why it works, and it is genuine physics.
Because the egg is not cooked into scrambled egg, and it is not raw.
It is emulsified – beaten with the cheese, and then combined with hot pasta and starchy cooking water, off the heat, and agitated.
And the starch in the water is the crucial ingredient, because starch is an emulsifier: it holds the fat and the water together and stops them separating.
So you get a sauce that is glossy, and thick, and clings – and it is made entirely of egg, fat and water, held in suspension by starch.
It is a technique. It is not an ingredient.
And cream is a shortcut
Which is the whole objection.
Because cream will give you a thick white sauce without any skill at all.
It cannot split. It cannot scramble. It is foolproof.
And it produces something heavier, blander, and completely different – and it removes the one thing that made the dish worth learning.
Eight postcodes and twelve hundred and sixty-one articles.
The word describes something difficult, somebody works out how to sell it, and the difficulty is the first thing removed.
And it is not ancient
Which is the correction that annoys everybody.
Because carbonara is recent. It appears in the mid-twentieth century, and it is not in the old Roman cookbooks.
And one very plausible account connects it to American soldiers in Italy after the war – who had rations of bacon and powdered egg, and Italian cooks who made something out of them.
It is contested. Nobody is certain.
A thing exists. Nobody wrote down why.
Verdict
And the name is argued about too
Which is entirely fitting.
Carbonaro means charcoal burner – and the theories are: that it was eaten by charcoal makers in the Apennines; that the black pepper looks like coal dust; or that it is named after the Carbonari, a secret political society.
Nobody knows.
Eight postcodes and twelve hundred and sixty-one articles: a thing exists, nobody wrote down why, and a beautiful explanation is supplied later by somebody who could not bear the gap.
Nobody knows where the word cocktail comes from either. Six theories, not one documented. Nobody knows why Satan’s Whiskers is called that.
An entire industry, and it cannot source its own vocabulary.
And the Prat’s editorial desk has stopped being surprised by this: the things people do every day are precisely the things nobody thinks to write down.
Verdict
Superb, cheap, strong number, and do not ask for cream.
Megan Amram is a standup comedian based in Portland, OR. She is a native of North London.
The thing about good writing is feeling the work behind every sentence.