As VI said, in Rome especially but Italy more generally, cream is not used in
spaghetti alla carbonara; I didn't want to go into that issue because ER's request was for the variant, very widespread these days in restaurants both in this country and also in Europe, that includes cream. I myself, whose family comes from the zone of the west coast of Italy that has one foot in the world of Roman/Laziale cuisine and the other in that of Neapolitan/Campanian cuisine, have transgressed a few times (in my wild, frivolous youth) by adding a little cream... It's pretty damn good, though not perhaps all that easy on the arteries... But, indeed, the traditional way includes no cream... And, just to sound like a broken record, NO GARLIC...
JoelF mentioned smoked pork products and there too we should remember that the traditional pork products used for this and related pasta dishes in Rome/Lazio are guanciale and pancetta (and in a pinch prosciutto), which are salt cured and not smoked. I have made carbonara with smoked bacon and the result is hardly revolting, but if the bacon is very smokey, that flavour tends to dominate too much if you use much meat. That's why I noted above that the Kurowski's bacon I got was not extremely strong in the smoke flavour and could be pressed into service for an emergency
spaghettata; the less smokey the bacon for this dish (or, say, an improvised
alla Matriciana), the better.
I agree with Rob that there is in some ways too much
fantasia in pasta preparations in this country. Italian cuisine certainly allows for and even celebrates creativity in the kitchen, especially in the realm of pasta dishes, but strictly speaking, and certainly in Italy, you can't put garlic in a dish with tomatoes and pancetta (or guanciale) and onion and call it
alla Matriciana. That dish is what it is, and in Lazio and environs, it's never made with garlic. There are plenty of other such dishes which for Italians allow a certain amount of variation along well-defined parameters but which in their restaurant presentation in the States (and by extension in American home-cooking), have been seriously altered in (from an Italian perspective) unacceptable ways, almost always in the direction of adding ingredients.
At some point, one can say this is "living cuisine", that "the recipes are being adapted to new settings and are being transformed", and at some point maybe that becomes a completely reasonable argument. But so long as there is an older tradition, whence sprung a dish and its name, and further that dish is still very widely consumed, I find it hard to think of restaurant usurpations of old names as a genuine culinary development that has supplanted the old traditional way of doing and naming things.
In the case of carbonara, the addition of cream has become so widespread that I think in most Americans' (and northern Europeans') minds, that combination is expected. In a better world, it should probably have a different name -- let's have a contest to come up with one...
My suggestion...
spaghetti alla cardiologa... And please pass the pecorino!...*
In any event, I still think Ron's request was hardly unreasonable in a place calling itself
La Scarola.
Antonius
* I have wondered in the past whether the addition of a touch of cream (which I have seen in Italy, though not in Rome or elsewhere Lazio) is a way of avoiding the problem of the eggs seizing up too much. One approach to that problem is to pretend that the eggs cook sufficiently from the heat of the pasta off any heat; this is a suggestion I heard from non-Italian television chefs. I gave it a try and in my experience, that method results in uncooked eggs with a texturally displeasing sliminess. My old Roman (with recipes in dialect) cookbook specifically says that one should combine spaghetti and guanciale and beaten eggs
over heat precisely in order to cook the eggs but I have found that one must also add a little liquid (nowadays I use the pasta cooking-water but I have done this with cream) and stir vigorously and not keep the pan on the heat very long to avoid getting little clumps of egg. Tempering the eggs apart before adding them to the spaghetti in the pan is also a way to achieve a smooth but cooked egg-sauce and one done very easily if one is using the pasta cooking water. Using a little (heated) cream in this way, as opposed to drowning the dish in an egg-cream sauce, strikes me as a non-canonical but hardly absurd adaptation, whatever one should then call the dish.
Editing: correction of typos
Last edited by
Antonius on September 13th, 2004, 3:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Alle Nerven exzitiert von dem gewürzten Wein -- Anwandlung von Todesahndungen -- Doppeltgänger --
- aus dem Tagebuch E.T.A. Hoffmanns, 6. Januar 1804.
________
Na sir is na seachain an cath.