On Friday, April 6, the world will
celebrate "Carbonara Day", an occasion launched by the Italian
Association of Confectionery and Pasta Industries (AIDEPI) and
the International Pasta Organisation (IPO), to celebrate the
dish made famous in Italy.
The first edition of Carbonara Day, held in 2017, involved 83
million pasta lovers, according to AIDEPI and IPO.
They said in last year's event, 29,000 people exchanged
opinions and recipes on social media regarding the dish, which
has gone international.
"Everyone has their secrets, and the perfect carbonara is a
challenge that excites every chef," said AIDEPI President
Riccardo Felicetti.
"We wanted to celebrate this dish in order to go beyond the
ideal recipe. There are excellent carbonaras that include the
'wrong' ingredients. They are proof of how well-known carbonara
is throughout the world," Felicetti said.
Organisers are promoting the hashtag #carbonaraday, which
will be used in a virtual event involving bloggers, journalists,
food influencers and chefs.
Italy is celebrating the famed egg-and-bacon-sauce spaghetti
dish amid a heated debate on the 'real' recipe and way of
cooking it.
Carbonara is perhaps the most loved and imitated pasta dish
in the world but also the most controversial.
Purists say that only pork tongue and not bacon or even
pancetta should be used, while enthusiasts are about evenly
divided over whether to add pecorino or parmigiano cheese.
Other divisive issues are whether to leave the egg white in
with the yolk and whether to add garlic or onion, and whether
other types of long pasta like bucatini or even short pasta such
as rigatoni can be used instead of spaghetti.
IPO and AIDEPI, while feting this culinary glory, are also
bidding to settle some of the vexed questions about how to make
it.
Follow the hashtag and you can join a debate that will see
bloggers, food influencers, journalists and chefs have their say
on the dish and more generally on the relationship between
tradition and innovation or fusion in cuisine.
Italian traditionalists insist there are only five carbonara
ingredients: pork tongue, pecorino, eggs, salt and pepper.
Innovators think that, since pasta is such a versatile dish,
there should be no limits on how carbonara can be interpreted,
going as far as "culinary science fiction", according to
detractors.
In France and Germany, for example, powdered ingredients are
on sale for preparing a carbonara; in Britain the egg is often
replaced by bechamel sauce; and in Japan chefs regularly add
cream and take out the pecorino - an affront to tradition
according to purists.
Traditionalists say there are five common mistakes in
preparing carbonara.
If pork tongue and pancetta can be interchangeable, they
maintain, would-be carbonara buffs must avoid at all costs that
the egg becomes an omelette by cooking it in a frying pan and
solidifying it.
They should never, furthermore, replace pecorino with
parmigiano or, an even worse sin, add cream, an ingredient that
makes the mix too oily and, purists say, makes it taste too
bland.
Finally, whatever French cooks have to say on the matter,
garlic and onion must be banned, since they are a superfluous
addition given that carbonara is already such a strongly
accented dish.
As with many recipes, the origins of the dish and its name
are obscure.
There are many theories for the origin of the name, which may
be more recent than the dish itself.
Since the name is derived from carbonaro (the Italian word
for charcoal burner), some believe the dish was first made as a
hearty meal for Italian charcoal workers.
In parts of the United States the etymology gave rise to the
term "coal miner's spaghetti".
It has even been suggested that it was created as a tribute
to the Carbonari ("charcoalmen"), a secret society prominent in
the early, repressed stages of Italian unification.
It seems more likely that it is an urban dish from Rome,
probably first described after WWII in the Italian capital, when
many Italians were eating powdered eggs and bacon supplied by
troops from the United States.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © Copyright ANSA
