Carbonara

Carbonara is a pasta dish from Italy’s Lazio region, built from cured pork, hard cheese, eggs, salt, and black pepper. Its modern identity and name emerged around the mid-20th century. The cheese is most often pecorino romano, though Parmesan, Grana Padano, or a blend may appear. Spaghetti is the usual pasta, but bucatini or rigatoni also work. Guanciale—cured pork jowl—is the traditional meat, but pancetta is common, and outside Italy, smoked bacon lardons often stand in. The dish’s origins and name remain murky. Most Italian sources point to Lazio. The names *pasta alla carbonara* and *spaghetti alla carbonara* don’t show up in print before World War II. Ada Boni’s 1930 *La cucina romana* omits it entirely. A 1931 Italian Touring Club guide describes a pasta from Umbria with whipped eggs, sausage, and pork fat—no cheese—that some see as a precursor. The first printed mention of *spaghetti alla carbonara* appears in a 1939 Dutch East Indies newspaper, noting a Trastevere restaurant known for it but giving no recipe. In 1950, *La Stampa* reported that American officers had been hunting for the dish in Trastevere for years, again without describing it. The earliest attested recipe comes from a 1952 Chicago cookbook by Patricia Bronté. Notably, the major 1950 Italian cookbook *Il cucchiaio d’argento* doesn’t include it. Italy’s first published recipe appeared in *La Cucina Italiana* in 1954, using pancetta, garlic, and Gruyère. That same year, Elizabeth David’s *Italian Food* included carbonara for English-speaking readers. The name likely derives from *carbonaro* (charcoal worker), leading to theories that the dish was a hearty meal for Italian charcoal burners. Pietro Lencioni, the Italian-American behind the first published recipe, came from an Iowa coal-mining family, and his cooking is framed as reflecting that background. John F. Mariani notes a theory linking it to the Carbonari secret society of early 19th-century Italian unification. Carbonara belongs to a family of pasta dishes with cured pork, cheese, and pepper, including *pasta alla gricia*. It closely resembles *pasta cacio e uova*, a dish of melted lard, eggs, and cheese (no meat or pepper), documented as far back as 1839. Some researchers say anecdotal evidence suggests Italians born before WWII called that dish “carbonara.” Gillian Riley calls carbonara likely an “urban dish” from Rome. A post-WWII origin is supported by the dish’s late appearance in cookbooks and media, after the Allied liberation of Rome in 1944. Food writer Alan Davidson, historian Luca Cesari, and historian Eleonora Cozzella back this view. Allied personnel are said to have enjoyed the dish and helped shape it by supplying bacon, cheese, cream, and powdered egg yolks. One story credits Italian army cook Renato Gualandi, who in 1944 created it with other cooks for a U.S. Army dinner using the Americans’ ingredients. Cozzella’s research suggests it evolved from a “spaghetti breakfast” that Allied troops requested at Italian cook shops—bacon and eggs served over spaghetti. Cesari notes that bacon and eggs were more familiar to Americans and British than to Italians at the time. The 1952 Chicago recipe likely reached the U.S. via an American serviceman who’d been in Rome or an Italian-American who encountered it there, making carbonara a dish linking Italy and America. Italian academic Alberto Grandi, citing Cesari, says the first attested recipe is American—a claim criticized in Italy. The 1954 *La Cucina Italiana* version slowly became today’s “canonical” carbonara. Pecorino and guanciale entered recipes in the late 1950s and 1960s. Cream was still common then; its widespread removal only happened in the 1990s. Grandi and Cesari suggest this removal aimed to fit the dish into an idyllic stereotype of rustic Italian cooking. For preparation, the pasta is boiled in lightly salted water, since the cured meat and cheese are already salty. The meat is briefly fried in its own fat.