What even is food authenticity? Why we guard carbonara — and flatten chicken rice. | josh iza.ac
There is a peculiar theater to the internet’s culinary landscape, and if you spend enough time<br>observing it, you will inevitably stumble into a warzone over authenticity. For example, no action<br>incites internet fury faster than recipes of spaghetti carbonara that includes a splash of cream<br>(or, god forbid, garlic). The discourse inevitably devolves into discussion about the<br>‘authentic’ way to cook something, with self-appointed gate-keepers stating (if they are feeling<br>generous) “this looks delicious, but you can’t call this carbonara”.
But food authenticity, as we so rigidly police it today, is largely a modern illusion — and if you<br>think even more deeply about it, doesn’t even make sense. Why do we decry home cooks for adapting a<br>Roman pasta with French ingredients (sparking international incidents such as ‘carbonara-gate’), while simultaneously lauding fusion creations such as<br>udon carbonara?
My local Eataly is down to break the Carbonara rules.
More glaringly, why do we apply these rules so unevenly across the map? Step into the realm of Asian<br>cuisine, and you often see the exact opposite phenomenon. A content creator will be widely<br>celebrated for an authentic Hainanese chicken rice recipe that, while undeniably delicious<br>looking on camera, fundamentally ignores the key regional flavors that make the Singaporean dish<br>what it actually is1. We demand absolute historical fidelity from<br>a bowl of Italian pasta, yet happily accept an aesthetic homogenization of Asian food.
Why are we shouting about authenticity without pausing to consider a dish’s history, its cultural<br>context, or its natural evolution? When we yell about cream on the internet (or lambast the<br>substitution of bacon for guanciale) we are rarely protecting an ancient, unbroken culinary lineage.
More often than not, we are simply fetishizing a recent consensus.
The most famous example of this phenomena is certainly the aforementioned carbonara — so well known<br>that it has become a meme beyond food media<br>(‘if my grandmother has wheels she would have been a bike!’).
A weeknight riff on carbonara with beef bacon, onsen egg, and chives.
Today, the authorized version of the dish is fiercely guarded: strictly guanciale (not bacon or<br>ham!), pecorino romano, eggs, and black pepper. But peel back the historical record, and you find<br>that this purity is a relatively modern invention.<br>Food historian Alberto Grandi has pointed out that carbonara<br>was practically non-existent in Italy before the 1940s (although thickening sauces with eggs has a long culinary tradition). The first recorded recipes don’t even<br>appear in Italy. There is a scant mention in a French newspaper in 1952, with the first detailed<br>recipe appearing not in Italy, but across the Atlantic in Chicago (Chicago!) later the same year,<br>using pancetta, egg yolks, parmigiano reggiano, and tagliatelle (however interestingly no pasta water).
Throughout the late 20th century, the dish remained fluid and diverse. Cooks experimented with<br>different cheeses, incorporated various herbs, and freely used cream. In Italian recipes, this<br>variation was embraced:
La Cucina Italiana (1954) : Carbonara with pancetta, garlic, whole eggs, and gruyere (a Swiss cheese!!)
La Grande Cucina (1960) : Carbonara with guanciale, eggs, pepper, parmigiano reggiano (so far so<br>good!) — except for the addition of cream, brown butter, and even setting the egg mixture<br>slightly over high heat (sussulto!).
Il Piccolo Talismano Della Felicita (1964) : Ada Boni calls for a carbonara with butter,<br>pancetta, wine, eggs, parmigiano reggiano, parsley, and onions (respiro drammatico!).
La Cucina Regionale Italiana (1980) : Italian chef Gualtiero Marchesi enthusiastically advocates<br>for the creamy variant in his definitive cookbook series,
It wasn’t until the late 1990s and early 21st century that the recipe crystallized into its current,<br>rigid dogma; but even this process was complex. Up until the 2010s, recipes were still appearing in<br>Italian cookbooks and newspapers that treated carbonara as a living, breathing dish with natural<br>substitutions. In 2013, La Cucina Italiana — the long-lived monthly Italian food and<br>cooking magazine that you might recognize from<br>the list above — was still recommending pancetta as a substitute for guanciale, grana padana in<br>addition to pecorino, and a splash of milk (if you are so inclined). It wasn’t until 2020 that their recipe<br>officially morphs into the ‘authentic’ carbonara we fight about today2.
The sudden elimination of cream might coincide with a wave of ‘gastronationalism’ — an<br>effort to construct a specific, unyielding national identity through the sanctity of food —<br>as well as social media and food snobbery. Whatever the cause, we<br>find ourselves in an odd situation where the fierce defense of ‘authentic’ carbonara is simply<br>enforcing a standard that we only universally agreed upon perhaps one...