The 50 Greatest Dishes of the World by James Steen

Author:James Steen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Icon Books Ltd

SPAGHETTI (OR SPAGHETTONI) ALLA CARBONARA

A classic Italian pasta dish. Cheap, quick, easy to make and even easier to eat.

This simple and inexpensive pasta dish has a name which has aroused immense intrigue. There are a number of theories of how it came to be known.

The spaghetti part of the name is fine. We all know what that is. The word itself derives from spago, from the Italian for string or cord, which stems from spacus, the Latin for twine. The pasta, of course, is like string, cord or twine. Alla Carbonara means in the style of the coal-worker or maker of wood charcoal. This gives us charcoal-maker’s string. Easy to see why the dish has yet to appear on a restaurant menu under its English translation.

The mystery centres on the coal-worker or workers. Who the devil were they? And how and why on earth could or would they have lent their name to this dish?

One theory is that the coal-workers who slaved away in the Apennine Mountains ended their day with this dish, which was cooked on a fire made from charcoal. This theory is widely disbelieved.

Another story is that the dish was created during the Second World War. American troops in Italy had rations of eggs and bacon and these ingredients, once in the hands of the local chefs, were added to pasta to become spaghetti alla carbonara. This is not credible because the dish was eaten before the war.

There is also the claim that it takes its name from the black pepper ground onto the top of the dish, pepper resembling coal. This is also deemed to be ridiculous.

Jeremy Parzan used his website, Do Bianchi, to share his theory:

While I have no solid evidence of this, my philological intuition leads me to believe that the innovation of carbonara was the inclusion of cured pork. To my knowledge, no gastronomer has made the connection between carbonara and carbonata, a term widely used in Renaissance Italy to denote a type of salt-cured and smoked pork.

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