Italians have been cooking carbonara wrong for 70 years, says food historian

Luca Cesari faced death threats after posting a video of himself making carbonara with the 'first' recipe. Photo / Luca Cesari

Italians have reacted with fury after being told they have been cooking spaghetti carbonara wrong for the last 70 years.

Luca Cesari, a leading food historian, found what he believes is the first recipe for the dish, published in an Italian cookery magazine called La Cucina Italiana in 1954.

The recipe features pancetta (bacon) instead of the guanciale (pork jowl) that modern recipes advise and Swiss gruyere cheese instead of equal portions of parmigiano and pecorino.

Instead of using just egg yolks, as is the custom now, the old recipe stipulates that yolks and whites should be tossed into the pan and whisked up into a scrambled egg-like mix to coat the pasta.

Most abhorrent to food purists, the original 1950s recipe includes garlic - which is never used in contemporary carbonara recipes.

‘Go to jail’

Carbonara, which hails from Rome, is regarded as a pillar of Italian cooking and has attained almost cult-like status, along with other staples such as amatriciana and cacio e pepe.

Cesari has faced a stream of abuse online, including death threats, after posting a video of himself on Instagram in which he makes carbonara with the old recipe.

“Go to jail”, “f*** off” and “bull****” were among the comments posted by gastronomic traditionalists, who were angered by the mere suggestion that garlic or pancetta should come anywhere near a plate of carbonara.

Gambero Rosso, an acclaimed guide to Italian food and drink, commented on its website: “You can bad talk the Pope and Lazio and Roma [the football teams], and the prime minister. But carbonara? No.”

Luca Cesari's carbonara using the 'first' recipe. Photo / Luca Cesari

The leading authority on Italian cuisine added: “The list of ingredients is enough to horrify any purist. The 1954 recipe seems completely wrong to us, starting with that cheese that has nothing to do with our tradition, right down to the instructions to cook the eggs in a frying pan. The result is a poorly seasoned and rather dry carbonara, very different from what we are used to.”

Cesari said he had just followed the old recipe and was surprised by the furore.

“I simply remade the 1954 carbonara, the first one featured in the Cucina Italiana magazine. It’s not my fault if that was the carbonara recipe,” he told Reuters.

“Over the years, a series of different recipes for carbonara have emerged, including those with raw ham in the fifties. In the US, you could even find versions with clams or mushrooms.”

Italian ‘gastro-nationalism’

Alberto Grandi, a food historian who has also challenged the orthodox shibboleths of Italian culinary heritage, came to Cesari’s defence.

He said some Italians subscribe to a sort of “gastro-nationalism” in which they will not tolerate any questioning of the country’s classic dishes.

Grandi, an academic at the University of Parma, accused Italians of clinging to “fairy tales” about their cuisine as a way of reinforcing their national identity.

He has claimed that carbonara was invented in 1944 using the bacon, cheese and powdered eggs that only American troops had access to in a country that had been laid to waste by World War II.