“But what is and what should never be…”

To say that I have a penchant for being opinionated is no doubt to understate the obvious. Whether it’s the only proper way to make a martini, the correct way to define “barbecue,” or the ingredients that do and don’t belong in a caprese salad, some things are just black and white in my culinary world. That’s not to say that you can’t play with a recipe and tweak it until it soaks your shorts instead of mine, but at that point it needs to be defined as something other than what it originally was. At no time, for instance, should ribs be parboiled or pre-roasted in an oven before being thrown on a grill. If you don’t have the time and patience to cook them low and slow, then put a hamburger on instead and call it a day. Nor does anything poured into a martini glass earn the right to be called a martini. If it doesn’t contain gin, dry vermouth, and an olive it is in no way, shape or form a martini. I don’t consider these general rules—I consider them law.

This country has, unfortunately, grown up with a severely bastardized version of what is an extremely simple, hearty, soul-satisfying peasant dish—a dish that each ethnicity has some version of—bacon and eggs. I’ve eaten in countless restaurants from coast to coast, that list on their menu what they claim to be “spaghetti carbonara,” but what they serve bears no resemblance whatsoever to its namesake. In fact, what diners usually get is pasta covered in a thick cream sauce that chokes out the life of what carbonara is with its sloppy stranglehold. Few restaurants get it right (Batali’s Otto is one of them), and by default few home cooks get it right because they mimic what the restaurants do. Meanwhile, there are hundreds of recipes available online, but many of them include cream, including Giada De Laurentiis’, the supposed resident Italian food expert on Food Network.

What carbonara is, is pasta tossed with eggs, fried bits of guanciale (or pancetta in its absence), cheese, white wine, a little pasta water and proper seasoning. And regardless of what anyone tells you, what carbonara isn’t, is a cream-based sauce. Carbonara never…ever…ever contains a single drop of cream. If done right, there is no need for any heretic cream in order to create that magical, luxurious, silky sauce. That’s left to the alchemy of the ingredients I mentioned before. For those of you that have an issue with eating a dish that contains raw egg, I suggest you order an Alfredo instead, and get that cream monkey off your back with that fix—just don’t fuck with the carbonara, OK? No eggs, no carbonara. All of this is not to say that adding a little cream into your dish is illegal—no kitchen police are gonna come and slap cuffs on you (unless you like that sort of thing). It’s just no longer a carbonara.

The true queen of Italian cooking, despite Giada’s impressive boobage, is Marcella Hazan, and it’s her recipe that I posted for you. Her Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking has a permanent home on my kitchen shelf, and its pages are littered with sauce stains if that’s any indication of how essential it truly is. The only way in which I sometimes veer from this recipe is to separate the eggs, reserve the yolks, and then put one atop each serving of pasta for the diner to break open, so it can ooze down the mound of pasta like a glorious overflowing volcano of culinary perfection. I thank Batali for that idea and take no credit for it whatsoever, no matter how many oohs and aahs I get at the dinner table—though I’ll admit it’s tempting.

Tagged as: marcella hazan, spaghetti carbonara