In the first episode of The Rest Is Pasta, I explore Britain’s relationship with Italian cooking and the remarkable story of a pasta called Alfredo.

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The Rest is Pasta

What Happens When Recipes Are Borrowed… and Then Given Back

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Britain has fallen in love with Italian food. But what happens when recipes travel from one country to another, adapting to new ingredients, tastes and traditions along the way?

In the first episode of The Rest Is Pasta, I explore Britain’s relationship with Italian cooking and the remarkable story of a pasta called Alfredo.

9hf48abc

2026/09/21

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The Rest is Pasta

What Happens When Recipes Are Borrowed… and Then Given Back

[music]

A few years ago, James May ended his television series Our Man in Italy by saying there’s a huge part of every one of us that wants to be Italian.

But I think he should have also said perhaps we just haven’t realised howItalian we already are. Today we are buying more pasta, pesto, and ‘nduja and burrata than ever before. We are already eating more like Italians, and if social media is anything to go by, we’re already arguing about food more like Italians too.

And study after study keeps coming back to the same conclusion. Britain loves Italian food more than any other world cuisine. In 2022, research from Kantar found that British households were eating the equivalent of 46 million Italian meals every week, more than twice as many as Indian dishes, even before adding pizza.

More recently, another survey from UK supermarket Waitrose confirmed Italian as Britain’s favourite cuisine to eat at home. In that survey, 46% said they preferred to eat Italian, with 44% voting for both Indian and British. But while Italian food has emerged as Britain’s favourite overseas cuisine, the situation in Italy is a little different.

Because if we look at research into Italian eating habits, we see that, of all nationalities, Italians are the least likely to enjoy what they see as foreign food. In terms of Britain and Italy, then, there does seem to be a little unrequited love going on. We are clearly more in love with bolognese, carbonara and lasagne than they are with roast dinners, fish and chips or sausage rolls. However, the imbalance in the Italy-Britain relationship begins to make sense the moment we realise that those 46 million Italian meals weren’t cooked in the same way or even in a similar way to how they would have been prepared in Italy.

Because for centuries, while British cuisine has done a terrible job of copying foreign dishes, it has done one thing fantastically well, and that is borrowing foods from around the world and making them, sometimes even claiming them, as its own.

Chicken tikka masala, chow mein, sweet and sour chicken, donna kebabs, even fish and chips. All of them foods arriving in Britain originally in very different forms, and definitely not in the ways we see them being cooked on British high streets today. And I wonder whether the same process of Anglicisation has also been going on in cookbooks and written recipes over the decades too.

Sometimes food writers had little choice but to adapt foreign recipes because the original ingredients simply weren’t available in Britain. But at other times,the changes really were deliberate, altering not just the ingredients but entire dishes, simply because that’s what they thought British people wanted to eat.

And I think that that process has had an enormous effect on British recipeswritten in periods like the early 1950s, When pasta is very much new andexciting and exotic. But I also think it’s particularly hard for us to imagine the escapism in cooking a plate of pasta when you’ve just lived through 14 years of wartime food rationing. But that’s what happened and that’s what people did. British cooks started to experiment and copy recipes in books and magazines and slowly these new dishes start to get embedded as British staples.

The part that I find really fascinating in all of this is actually the fact that in less than a generation, there are so many more British cooks making Italian dishes so regularly that they have the confidence to invent Italian and reinvent variations of dishes or just simply debate whether a recipe is authentic or not.

Incidentally, we’re going to be talking about how lazy I think we’ve becomewhen it comes to using words like authentic and traditional to describe ourcooking in a future episode of The Rest is Pasta. And I do promise that I willtry not to be unreasonably triggered by that particular discussion.

But let’s come back to the idea of recipes being borrowed or even appropriated by other countries. And one of the best examples I can think offor that actually comes from Italy. It’s a recipe whose roots can be traced back centuries and a dish that has provoked controversy. It’s called Fettuccine Alfredo, which, if you didn’t know, is simply Fettuccine dressed with butter and parmesan. But the fascinating thing is that only a few years ago, Alfredo was hardly known by that name in Italy. And it certainly wasn’t celebrated the way it is today. Because in Italy, plain pasta or boiled rice with butter is what you eat when you’re sick and you have to ‘mangiare in bianco,’ which is to eat plainer, simpler, literally ‘white’ food. I’ve been on the receiving end of exactly that advice from Italian doctors and more than a few family members in the past, so I can appreciate why making a fuss about convalescent food might seem a little odd to older generations.

Ironically though, The story of Alfredo actually begins with a convalescent dish. In 1908, the story goes, Roman restaurateur Alfredo dell’Elia creates a simple pasta dish for his wife as she recovers from childhood. They like it somuch that it goes straight on their restaurant menu. Over the following years,the dish supposedly attracts the attention of American writer Sinclair Lewis, who mentions Fettuccine in his 1922 novel Babbitt, and then Hollywood stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, who are said to have discovered it on honeymoon and later served it at dinner parties in Beverly Hills.

How much of that is true is another question, but by 1927, Alfredo is appearing in American newspapers and magazines and gradually finding its place in Italian-American cooking. And once it gets there, therecipe really begins to change. In the years following the Second World War,butter and cream become increasingly fashionable ingredients in pasta sauces. Plenty of 1950s carbonara recipes feature one or both of them, and by the early 1960s, cream has also found its way into Italian-American Fettuccine Alfredo, where it remains for much of the rest of the century.

But the really interesting transformation comes later on. And in a similar way to what happens with carbonara, the original recipe becomes shorthand for a particular type of sauce. Carbonara suddenly gets variations like asparagus carbonara, Mushroom carbonara, Smoked Salmon carbonara, and so on, while Alfredo becomes shorthand for ‘anything you like on a buttery, cheesy sauce.’

And the more inventive these variations become, the wider the cultural divide grows.

In America, Alfredo is embraced as part of the Italian-American culinary tradition while on the other side of the Atlantic, Italian pasta purists can hardly believe their luck because there’s a new antichrist in town and his name is Alfredo. Chicken Alfredo, prawn Alfredo, broccoli Alfredo, even blue cheese and steak Alfredo.

Now, I have to confess to having a certain amount of sympathy for those poor, tortured Italian foodies, because in cooking I’ve learnt from personal experience that just because you can doesn’t mean to say that you should. And I think, well I hope, that the Italian-American ‘more is more’ approach might be finally running out of steam.

Except that there are worrying signsthat it hasn’t.

And I can say that because of the most bizarre twist to this story. And that is, for the last couple of years, here and there, Italian food content creators onInstagram have been starting to cook Alfredo with cream. Just like they do inAmerica.

But more incredibly than that, if you’re visiting Rome this year, you can now walk into the Trinità dei Monti restaurant, and order a fettuccine with cream and parmesan for just 16 euros.

That’s got to be one of thebiggest recipe U-turns ever. And it also prompts a huge question:

If Italians start putting cream in Alfredo, does it then become acceptable?

Have we absolved the sins of the previous generations?

I’m not sure if I can answer those questions, but one thing I think is clear. The recipes we thought would never be eaten, accepted or enjoyed in Italy seem to be now finding a home.

And I find it astounding that it’s taken generations of American cooks to persuade younger Italian generations that Italian American food might be the new normal.

They’ve made them want to cook a dish that used to belaughed out of town.

So if Alfredo with Cream really does catch on in Rome, the Americans won’t just have changed an Italian recipe. They’ll have changed what Italians accept as their own.

They’ll have made Alfredo Roman again.

[music]

it started with cream
does papalina matter?
strasciati - carbonara - papalina
recipe

IT STARTED WITH CREAM

During the Covid Pandemic I began researching the thorny problem of cream in Carbonara - where had it come from, how did it grow in popularity, and so on. I’d heard about the story of Fettuccine alla Papalina, the dish supposedly invented for Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who would become Pope Pius XII in 1939 - and wondered if later confusion with that dish could have contributed to the tradition that emerged, from the 1950s onwards, of adding cream to Carbonara.

As I researched Papalina, an anecdote kept surfacing: that Cardinal Pacelli, reputedly troubled by a sensitive stomach, had once asked a Roman restaurateur to prepare a special dish for him. The resulting dish, according to these accounts, was a more ‘refined’ version of Carbonara: fettuccine in a sauce with cream, eggs, pecorino, onion and prosciutto crudo.

And that’s when the plot thickens - some food historians have dated Pacelli’s request to the early 1950s, when Carbonara was THE pasta dish taking pockets of Rome by storm, presumably also influenced by the dish’s name - you’d have to be a pope, after all, to have a dishes named ‘papalina’ in your honour… Others, on the other hand, including the account in Carnacina & Veronelli’s ‘La Cucina Rustica Regional’ book, which landed on my doorstep this morning, maintain that Pacelli’s request to Cesare Simmi, the proprietor of La Cisterna restaurant, happened some time in the 1930s, and the dish went on to acquire its ‘papalina’ name once Cardinal had become Pope.

I’ve recently corresponded with the current owners of La Cisterna restaurant, who have told me that the Simmi family had confirmed Pacelli was a regular there in the 1930s. They also believe it was then that he asked Simmi to prepare the pasta that would become Papalina.

This version of events is also echoed by Oretta Zanini De Vita in Popes, Peasants, and Shepherds (2013), where she describes Papalina as a variant of Carbonara prepared for Pacelli while he was still a cardinal, and renamed after his election. Frank Fariello tells a similar story in his Memorie di Angelina article dated July 2009 - and explicitly calls out the elephant in the room: how could a dish created before 1939 have been adapted from something supposedly invented during the war?

DOES PAPALINA MATTER?

Even more than the previous observation… because for Chef Cesare Simmi to devise a dish based on a Carbonara, Carbonara would of course have had to be an already established recipe, or at least known in restaurant circles at the time. And that potentially pushes Carbonara’s possible first creation date back several years.

Reading this possible chain of events together with the recently discovered 1939 article by Nora Berkhuijsen gives us an intriguing possibility - Carbonara may have been an established and well known recipe in the Trastevere quarter of Rome earlier than the mid-1930s.

IS CARBONARA UMBRIAN?

I’d be betraying my inner pasta detective if I didn’t also mention the Strascinati you may remember from the Touring Club Italiano’s 1931 listing (see the Recipe Map, above). Given the huge similarity in ingredients, if we consider that dish to be an ancestor of Spaghetti alla Carbonara, we could be remarkably close to being able to pinpoint the window during which Strascinati evolved into Spaghetti alla Carbonara and found its way from the Umbrian hills to Trastevere in Rome.

I was recently sent some fascinating material from Giampiero Giustini, the owner of Locanda Giustini in Assisi, which included details of the historic recipe they served (rolled and cut pasta ribbons called ‘penchi’, served with a sauce of sausage, guanciale, yolks, pecorino, lemon zest and nutmeg). They also sent me a copy of a letter from a regular customer, originally from Casica, at a restaurant they previously managed in Cascia (Ristorante Cursula).

The letter is a request to make a booking at the restaurant, and the writer (aged in his 90s in 1991) asks the owners to cook their signature dish – and also his favourite dish – of STRASCINATI, just like his own Nonna used to make.

Of course, if Sig. Rasi was in his 90s in 1991, his memories of his grandmother cooking strascinati could date from any time between c. 1896 and the late 1910s!

Look back at the Recipe Map – before 1896, we have three possible recipe ‘lineages’ that I’ve linked to Carbonara: Cavalcanti’s Cacio e Ova (1839), Pasta alla Gricia (possibly pre-20th century) and Pasta with Butter and Cheese (much older, probably pre-Renaissance).

All of those potential ‘contributing’ recipe lineages fit perfectly with a possible first creation date for Umbrian Strascinati in the latter half of the 19th century.

And of course, as I’ve mentioned before in other articles, it would be quite possible for a recipe to emerge independently of any other recipe listed on the diagram.

STRASCINATI-CARBONARA-PAPALINA : COULD THIS HAVE HAPPENED?

Based on this recent evidence, I think it’s certainly plausible that a version of what became known as ‘Carbonara’ might have reached Rome via an older Umbrian recipe tradition by the 1920s. It might have been very similar to the 1931 Touring Club recipe, or it may have already been slightly adapted – with strascinati making way for Roman long pasta shapes, including spaghetti. By the 1930s, newly rechristened to echo its rural roots and perhaps also link to the signature spice in the dish, Carbonara becomes embedded in the local restaurant circuit in Trastevere.

At some point in the 1930s, Cardinal Pacelli makes his famous request for a more ‘refined’ Carbonara to Chef Cesare Simmi. Papalina is born but remains an obscure, unpublished recipe, featuring in only one media mention until the late 1960s – a RAI TV feature on 20th July 1955. In the clip, Papalina is described as a ‘speciality’ of La Cisterna restaurant, but no ingredients are given and the commentary links the dish to Pope Sixtus V!

In 1968 we find the earliest published recipe I’ve located so far for Papalina. American Home’s October issue carries a recipe for spaghetti in a sauce of cooked ham, mushrooms, onions, yolks, parmesan and parsley – and – 8 tablespoons of butter or margarine.

From the mid-1950s onwards, Carbonara of course overshadowed both Strascinati and Papalina as it began its journey towards the piggy custard fest adored by today’s social media… but I wonder… were the myriad cream-based Carbonaras in the 70s and 80s influenced by the Pope with the sensitive stomach who ended up being served a cream, cheese and egg pasta?

Dante would have called that a ‘contrapasso’ – the punishment we receive in the afterlife turning out to be fitting retribution for our earthly sins.

Me? I just think sometimes life can be funny like that.

Recipe

The first time I recreated Papalina I followed what seems to have been the ‘classic’ version (above) - frying the prosciutto crudo in butter before incorporating it into the sauce. More recently, I’ve taken pity on poor Pacelli - and my own liver - and done a variation with uncooked prosciutto, added at the plating stage (below). It’s a taste I prefer and, I think, one more step towards ‘refined’ - I’m pretty sure His Sensitiveness would have approved.

Read more

how we really cook
wonderful things
recipes are like starlight
sex, lies and spaghetti
the ingredients
what was invented and where?

Hiding in plain sight for over half a century, the history of Spaghetti alla Puttanesca teaches us more than almost any other recipe about how dishes are named, evolve and reach celebrity status - sometimes for entirely the wrong reasons.

HOW WE REALLY COOK

Some of my good friends are food historians. But there are others out there who seem determined to approach food history in a really linear way. This recipe came first, that one influenced this one, which led to this variation, and so on. But the truth is, when you and I cook, when we throw new dishes together on a Saturday night for a special weekend meal, we’re not always advancing the history of a recipe in a linear way. However, even though we don’t have to be bound by seasonality and we can combine new flavours and ingredients in a way that the cooks of the past couldn’t, I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that they were less inventive than we are.

I can cross continents and come up with a new recipe that uses unfamiliar combinations of ingredients on a whim, just by crossing the supermarket aisle. What influenced the historical cooks to create their recipes, though, is far more fascinating than that, and considerably harder to work out. But I have a feeling it’s more complicated than simply drawing lines to link recipes on a diagram.

So I think there might be a real case for taking a much broader approach to food history. In the case of pasta, maybe that means identifying families of dishes that share ingredients, techniques and characteristics - even if they have different names. Because what I’m discovering more and more in the course of my research is that trying to follow the history of a recipe’s name can tell you surprisingly little about the history of the dish itself.

So I’m going to do the opposite. I’m going to follow the trail of the ingredients in Puttanesca.

And, in a bit, I think we should start with a trip to a brothel.

WONDERFUL THINGS

First let’s step back and take a wider view - and this is the bit when I break open the tomb and you get to see ‘wonderful things.’ The diagram I’ve drawn above illustrates my recent research into Puttanesca - a collection of historical recipes sharing ingredients and characteristics with the dish we recognise today, alongside others that appear to belong to the same extended family.

But here's the crucial part - unlike a family tree, the recipes in this diagram aren't meant to show a direct line of descent.

My diagram shows recipe variants that have appeared over time; some with shared and some with very different characteristics - but you shouldn’t assume that any of them is necessarily a consequence of any of the others.

I don’t want you to think that Cavalcanti’s 19th-century Vermicelli recipe has to be, for example, the reason my neighbour came up with an idea for a Minimalist Puttanesca. My next-door neighbour hasn’t the slightest idea who Ippolito Cavalcanti was, but the combination of ingredients Cavalcanti devised might have been the catalyst for this distinctive family of pasta sauces - ideas that perhaps travelled through space and time from 19th-century Naples until, one autumn day in 2026, they reached Sharon next door.

So the point is the family of sauces evolves because the recipes and the knowledge is out there, being shared and tinkered with and constantly adapted; all of us choosing to add more of this or that or -yuk- to leave that one out altogether.

RECIPES ARE LIKE STARLIGHT

Honestly.

A few weeks ago during the hot weather in London I couldn’t sleep and found myself, unusually for me, thinking of pasta. And that’s when it hit me. The historical recipes we uncover today are very like what astronomers see in the sky. Recipes are snapshots of moments back in time - a glimpse of the tastes we enjoyed and the cooks we used to be. They don’t always tell us when that combination of ingredients was first cooked, how many people were already preparing something similar, or even what happened to it afterwards.

But just like the darkness in astrophotography doesn’t mean there’s nothing there in reality, the gaps between my recipes on the diagram don’t mean there was nobody cooking something like a ‘puttanesca’ at that time. In fact, possibly again just as with astronomy, the more we look, the more we’re likely to find!

Let’s get back to those hookers.

SEX, LIES AND SPAGHETTI

You’ve probably heard the origin story - back-streets of Naples, whore houses, ‘slutty spaghetti,’ ‘slaghetti,’ and so on. You might have even read accounts of alternative theories explaining how this pasta dish got its admittedly rather unusual name. Maybe you believed some of them.

If you did, today might need to be Atonement Day. Because in this mini-series I’m going to show you why all those stories of how Puttanesca was invented - and even how it got its name - might just be complete and utter nonsense.

So where did all of those accounts come from in the first place? Who decided that Naples’ prostitutes had anything to do with a plate of pasta? Was anyone actually telling these stories when the dish supposedly came into existence? Or did someone simply translate a bizarre recipe name, which prompted the creation of a historical narrative? Have we actually just made up Puttanesca’s seedy back story?

I’ve been looking into the brothels of Naples, so to speak. Despite the countless retellings and sharings of a story people seem to desperately want to believe, I’ve yet to find any convincing documentary evidence connecting the invention of Spaghetti alla Puttanesca – or even its naming – to Naples’ sex workers. What I have found, though, are some rather revealing examples of when and where the story might have started to be told.

By the 1970s and 1980s, food writers like Paula Wolfert and Diane Seed were linking Puttanesca to Neapolitan prostitutes. In 1977, Wolfert described the supposedly irresistible cooking aromas used to attract customers, although she also adds an anecdote about the dish being perfect for cheating housewives needing to prepare dinner quickly for unsuspecting husbands. A decade later in 1987, Seed tells us in The Top One Hundred Pasta Sauces that prostitutes on the job had little time to go shopping and would be forced to improvise simple pasta dishes like Puttanesca from store-cupboard ingredients. By 1998, Arthur Schwartz’s Naples at Table gives us three explanations to choose from: a brothel keeper in Naples’ Spanish Quarter serving the dish to his customers, a supposed resemblance between the sauce’s ingredients and the colour of the prostitutes’ underwear, and even a French prostitute named Yvette, who’s supposed to be responsible for giving the dish its salacious name.

There is remarkably little historical evidence – if any – offered to support any of these explanations.

But I think that, to use one of my favourite food historian’s terms, all of that might be a little arse-backwards. Before we try to reverse-engineer a meaning from a recipe’s name, though, how about working out what went into the dish? Or simply, whether it existed anywhere else, before someone called it Puttanesca?

THE INGREDIENTS

A few seconds’ Googling will point you towards Naples, of course, and a number of recipes written by just one man, Ippolito Cavalcanti, in the first few decades of the 19th century. These dishes, however, don’t include what we’d recognise as the modern combination of Puttanesca ingredients - tomato, olives, capers and anchovies - and none of them carries the name Puttanesca.

And look at what happens in my diagram, in the space of a few generations from Cavalcanti’s Vermicelli all’Oglio (olives, capers and anchovies) of 1844.

Hardly anything at all.

We have to wait until 1852 for Cavalcanti to come up with a recipe for a Timpano di Vermicelli Ingranito (a baked pasta with tomatoes, olives, anchovies, onion, fish, mushrooms, peas and breadcrumbs)… and then until 1881 for Francesco Palma to publish a recipe for another Timpano, which turns out to be exactly the same as Cavalcanti’s.

But then something very interesting happens at the turn of the century - and it happens in Sicily. Recipes become simpler; the elaborate nineteenth-century Neapolitan timpano gives way to the kind of pasta-and-sauce dishes we’re more accustomed to. And then we get a flurry of activity in, of all places, the United States.

Look at how those 1930s dishes are beginning to resemble our own idea of Puttanesca - many of the ‘modern’ main ingredients are there, as are, noticeably, distinctly Sicilian echoes - fennel, pine nuts, currants. Two recipes even include ‘alla Siciliana’ in their names.

Let’s backtrack a few decades and look at what’s happening in Sicily. In 1910, Alberto Cougnet publishes the first Sicilian recipe in our researched selection to include tomato, along with olives, capers and anchovies… but then can’t stop himself adding yellow peppers, garlic and basil as well.

But the precedent is set. A tomato-based member of the ‘puttanesca’ family of recipes has appeared in Sicily and a couple of decades later the La Rosa Macaroni Co. prints two more tomato-based recipes belonging to that same extended ‘puttanesca’ family.

And that begs the million-dollar question - did ‘Puttanesca’ hitch a ride from Sicily to the USA independently of any influence from Neapolitan recipes? It’s certainly a possibility, but right now, we just haven’t found the evidence.

WHAT WAS INVENTED AND WHERE?

Did you spot what’s been missing from all of the ‘puttanesca’ recipes in the first 100 years of the Evolution Diagram?

The name Puttanesca.

And perhaps that’s the real puzzle here. Because while these recipes have been evolving, crossing borders and changing ingredients for generations, it’s not until the post-war period in the Naples area that our family of recipes finally acquires the name we know it by most today… along with a set of competing claims of invention: the painter Eduardo Colucci, his nephew the Ischia restaurateur Sandro Petti and even the film director Luchino Visconti have all been linked to the invention of the modern recipe of Spaghetti alla Puttanesca.

And, rather interestingly, none of them, as far as we know, includes a link to the prostitutes of Naples.

In the next part of SEX, LIES AND SPAGHETTI, we’ll investigate all these rival claims and ask whether the real invention was actually the dish itself, or simply its scandalous and fantastically unforgettable name…

more recipes

more food history

In Part 4 of Authentically British Carbonara I gave you the recipe for Spaghetti alla Carbonara di Santa Maria in Trastevere, from ‘With Gusto and Relish,’ written in 195y by Lord Westbury and Donald Downes. It’s a dish that’s made me look back at some of the other early 1950s recipes we have for Carbonara, and it’s made me notice something quite startling.

BUTTER - A SIGN OF THE TIMES

Take a close look at the ingredients listed for the 1950s Carbonara recipes in the diagram above. Notice how many of those early variations list butter as an ingredient, with Italian writers alongside British and American. You’ll probably be aware that nowadays the guanciale-pecorino-yolks-pepper mantra reigns supreme; alongside cream, putting butter in your carbonara puts you firmly in cancellation territory. But back in the 1950s, it seems almost as if there there was a real developing tradition of including in Spaghetti alla Carbonara as many dairy fats as you could lay your hands on!

I wondered if this might be if not a smoking gun, then perhaps a suspiciously steaming plate of Carbonara. A plate of Carbonara based on a butter and cheese sauce. After all, Fettuccine all’Alfredo had been a Roman recipe sensation for a good couple of decades by the outbreak of WW2, and we don’t have - as yet - confirmation of the ingredients in the Carbonara that Nora Koch wrote about in 1939. How hard would it have been for someone to simply add pancetta or guanciale to buttery, cheesy Alfredo and come up with the first Carbonara? The same recipe would probably have surfaced again in the post war years, as soon as rationing and the economy allowed the return of bums on trattoria seats. Exactly, in fact, as the diagram above seems to show.

Has one of Carbonara’s ancestors being hiding in plain sight for a hundred years?

WHEN WE THINK WE’RE ALWAYS RIGHT

Then I stopped and thought. Several times. Because I was reminded of the many times I’ve noticed that irritating and appalling trend in modern food writing. The one where we snigger and scoff and pick holes in old recipes or techniques. Butter or cream in Carbonara? ‘Clearly didn’t know what they were doing… making it up as they went along…’ and so on. And that’s terrible. It’s as if we’ve come to happily accept a kind of default attitude - where our modern, codified versions of recipes are assumed to be the correct, ‘authentic’ versions of those dishes.

Even worse, many of these ‘genuine’ recipes are wrapped up in retrospective and, frankly, completely made-up folklore. With Spaghetti alla Puttanesca it’s the brothels of Naples; with Cacio e Pepe we’re asked to believe in the original galloping gourmets, the shepherds of anywhere from Lazio to Molise to Puglia (depending on who’s telling you the story) who tended their flocks accompanied by a trusty rucksack stuffed with a cooking pot and all their pasta-ready ingredients. With Carbonara, we’re told either the dish was conjured up out of American Army rations for a top-brass banquet, or that it caught on thanks to those same rations being available on the black market in Rome, because the GIs missed their ham and eggs so much! (Unfortunately for those two theories, we know have proof that the name Carbonara was well-known in Rome at least four years before the Allies got anywhere near the Eternal City!).

All these recipes - and there are many more - do have one truth in common. They’re all ‘presented-as-traditional’ dishes whose origin stories we’ve come to desperately want to believe. A cosy and comforting ‘golden age’ where the cicadas chirp 24-7 in the olive groves and the whole family plus dog, cats and chickens sit down together to eat their cucina povera greatest hits, in front of a backdrop of the rolling hills of Tuscany or the Amalfi Coast.

In reality, the majority of these back-stories have little to do with the likely origins of the pasta dishes they involve; yet still they remain endlessly repeated online and in cookbooks; lazy people telling stories that are easy to remember.

And so it’s no surprise that there’s a real temptation to look back at the cooks of the past and think that when it comes to getting the ingredients and the techniques right, again we’re the ones who know it all. It’s easy to dismiss butter (and later cream) in Carbonara as either a feel-good ingredient that found its way into the recipe after years of wartime food rationing, or simply a crass and extravagant 1950s food fad, included as part of the ‘Frenchification’ of Italian cuisine.

The reality, I think, could be a little more nuanced. And in the case of butter, it could be entirely due to how the ingredients and the cooking techniques of Carbonara evolved.

THINKING LIKE A CHEF

And so, as much as I love a conspiracy theory, I conceded reluctantly that there might actually be another reason for the butter mountain of Trastevere. The answer came when I started thinking like a chef. Or perhaps a home cook with fading cheffy aspirations.

Here’s the fundamental problem. Despite its apparently simple list of ingredients, it’s not that easy to cook an edible, credible Carbonara - it needs to be safe to eat, look good, and be delicious too. (The first time you make it, you’ll probably make scrambled eggs - as I did.) But I think if we look at the issues the writers and cooks were facing when they tried to make those early Carbonaras, it’s pretty easy to deduce the reasons for choosing the ingredients they did.

Have another look at the Carbonara diagram above. The vast majority of those recipes rely on cuts of pork like pancetta, coppa or bacon - cuts of pork that aren’t guaranteed to deliver lots of rich, rendered fat. And loads of fatty lipids is exactly what a ‘minimalist’ sauce like Carbonara needs - to be able to create the right balance of fat and water and make the perfect emulsion of egg, cheese and pasta water to coat the pasta.

So let’s put ourselves in the position of a 1950s Roman cook, or chef … or a 1950s food writer. Our available pig isn’t the fatty modern choice, guanciale - and that’s a fairly significant problem, because we need enough fat in the recipe to be able to make a silky and delicious egg and cheese based sauce.

I think that’s the main reason why so many of those early recipes included butter, and often also, oil too. They weren’t trying to be French, or create a rich and opulent sauce just for the sake of it. They were simply trying to make enough of a sauce in a consistency that would cover the pasta!

WHEN CHEFS WENT CHEFFY AND THEN GOT NASTY

Decades passed and cream joined butter in the stable of dairy fats in Carbonara. And then gradually, some time around the late 1990s, overtly buttery and creamy Carbonaras, along with shoulder pads and big perms, began to fall out of fashion. This coincided with a gradual paring down of ingredients lists - superfluous mushrooms, garlic, onion and parsley all fell by the wayside as a purer, simpler Carbonara taste surfaced. It tasted of history, an imagined cucina povera staple which became the star of a new narrative: Carbonara’s always been that way - just four simple rustic ingredients.

The fabricated myths began to be recirculated, first offline and then, with the birth of social media, online too. In 2010 Instagram joined YouTube and Facebook and transmission rates for the new Carbonara myths (along with a reinforcement of other origin stories, like that relating to the 1944 Liberation of Rome / Army Rations Carbonara) increased exponentially.

And that’s when chefs went cheffy. And then got nasty.

Even as late as 1999, it might have been perfectly respectable to throw a knob of butter or a tablespoon or three of cream into a Carbonara - but barely a decade later Italian cooking appeared to have descended into chaos. In 2008 the Accademia Italiana della Cucina proclaimed butter to be amongst Carbonara’s ‘infamies,’ whilst at the same time declaring a carbonara made with garlic, olive oil that mixed Parmesan and Pecorino was the “true recipe.”

So suddenly, Carbonara was very, very different. Butter, cream and extra oil were out and rendered guanciale fat was in. This was a dish that needed to look good on social media; over-the-top, extravagant, visually stunning. It didn’t matter that it looked like spaghetti dressed in a gallon of custard with cheeky chunks of cheeky crispy bacon - in fact, that was the point. More was definitely more.

And that’s how Carbonara became the poster child for a brand new concept: ‘Food Porn.’

Some time around 2012 ‘Carbo-crema’ arrived, along with a precisely codified - and exceedingly tricky - cooking technique. Which of course was, yet again, a godsend for social media. Imagine a pasta that everyone loves but is just a little bit difficult to get right. Ideally sidestep salmonella but also avoid making an omelette. Unboxing videos, make-up tutorials and even kittens were now going to have to make way for what looked like several decades of Carbonara How-tos to come as we wrestled with bain-maries, adding extra cooking water and many other ‘tips for the perfect Carbonara.’

But let’s backtrack a moment, because the one aspect of all of that which I find fascinating but also incredibly hard to believe is that in the space of just a few years, ingredients can go from accepted and not being given a second thought to ‘disgusting’ and completely ostracised. It’s a phenomenon that I really struggle to explain. But then maybe we really are just that fickle.

Today, nearly fifteen year later, I get the impression little has changed, with the exception perhaps that the last 18 months or so have seen a handful of ‘influencers’ actually recreating ‘old school’ Carbonaras. And it’s been fascinating to watch the keyboard battles. Millions and billions of pixels on tiny screens forming the expected clichés: “Well that’s not real Carbonara then!’ …. ‘Eewwwww disgusting!’ ….‘My Nonna never made Carbonara with Pancetta!’… ‘Well my dog’s a rescue dog from Rome and he ALWAYS eats Carbonara with cream,’ and so on…

But now what? I’m not taking bets. Maybe ‘Custardnara’ has become just too embedded to be toppled. Maybe a new sense of history will prevail.

Or maybe there’s a new ‘old’ pasta waiting in the wings, just itching to be Carbonazzled.

NEXT WEEK… my research uncovers a contemporary mention of the Roman restaurant linked to the earliest known mention of Spaghetti alla Carbonara … from 1937.

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more food history

with gusto and relish
early carbonara recipe timeline
on the plate
the recipe

WITH GUSTO AND RELISH

When I get my hands hold on an old cookbook nowadays, one of the first things I do is to flick to the index and take a glance at whether there’s an entry for Carbonara or Puttanesca - my current pasta history obsessions.

Imagine my delight when I received a 1957 copy of Lord Westbury and Donald Downes’ With Gusto and Relish which included recipes for both Carbonara and Puttanesca. Because neither of their recipes for those two pastas could be called an ordinary!

I’ll be bringing you Westbury & Downes’ surprising variation of Spaghetti alla Putanesca (their own spelling!) in a future article… today we’re going to marvel at their recipe for Spaghetti alla Carbonara di Santa Maria in Trastevere.

Now, if you’re relatively new to the world of Carbonara studies, you may not appreciate quite how monumental it is to see that recipe’s name in print. The Piazza di Santa Maria in Trastevere is mentioned by journalist Nora Koch-Berkhuijsen in her 1939 article which names the dish for the very first time. Berkhuijsen tells us that a trattoria in the Piazza was serving ‘spaghetti alla carbonara’; ‘strings’ like the charcoal burner’s wife makes them.”

Of course, this was just months before the outbreak of the Second World War and the beginning of the Missing Years in Carbonara history - the period for which, unsurprisingly, we currently have no written record of Carbonara, anywhere.

But Westbury and Downes’ book has produced a wonderful coda for the recipe’s early history. Simultaneously, it rounds off the path that began with Spaghetti alla Carbonara appearing in Berkhuijsen’s 1939 article and which would continue with several cameos in the immediate post war Italian media, before featuring in a two US publications… Then, during the same period in the early 1950s, we see a cluster of recipes for Carbonara across American, Italian, and British cookbooks and magazines.

By naming their dish the way they did, Westbury & Downes’ recipe brings us full circle to Carbonara’s earliest known named origin, and the epicentre of what would be the start of the dish’s spread across the Italian capital.

ON THE PLATE

Like some of the other earlier Carbonaras I’ve cooked, some of the quantities here were very on the parsimonious side, so for my second test I’ve increased the amounts of bacon and cheese I used very slightly - that’s what you can see in the plate shots on this page.

The ‘Santa Maria’ Carbonara definitely isn’t what you’ll be served in Roman tourist traps today. I’d call it not over-sauced, but then I do prefer to be able to finish a whole portion of Carbonara. As with all of these historic recipes, remember you’re tasting history - and this variation of Spaghetti alla Carbonara definitely belongs to a much earlier evolutionary stage.

No, the bacon doesn’t have quite the taste of guanciale but I don’t think we should demand that it should. Pancetta or bacon was the most frequently used cut of pork in the 1950s - why impose modern flavours on the past? Ditto for the sauce. There’s not much of it, but that’s the point. Restrained extravagance. If you follow the recipe quantities you’ll get a subtly buttery, silky pasta with an understated glaze, not gallons of custard.

And I think that’s all you need to make simple ingredients combine and shine. Less is definitely more.

Recipe

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the strange case of the missing black pepper
the back story
the first ‘golden age’ in pasta history?
evolution of carbonara diagram
the missing spice
on the plate
the recipe

THE STRANGE CASE OF THE MISSING BLACK PEPPER

Last week I wrote about the first recipe for Carbonara published in Britain, Theodora FitzGibbon’s Spaghetti Carbonara. Whilst both Elizabeth David and Theodora would have presumably experienced very similar Roman Carbonaras when they were in Rome, I think it’s fascinating to see the different routes they adopted for their own recreations, particularly when it comes to the use of black pepper. Both of these two very early British carbonara recipes actually omit pepper, while the contemporary Cucina Italiana Carbonara (Aug 1954) demands plenty of it!

But before we get into all of that, let’s take a step back and consider what could have shaped these two groundbreaking British pasta recipes.

THE BACK STORY

The first record of Carbonara being served in Rome comes in 1939, from the Dutch-language newspaper De Koerier, which was published in modern-day Jakarta (then the Dutch East Indies). Discovered in 1926 by Dutch food journalists Janneke Vreugdenhil and Edwin Winkels, the article was originally the work of journalist Norah Koch Berkhuijsen, the paper’s Rome correspondent, who wrote a regular column titled "Mensen en dingen uit Rome" ("People and Things from Rome").

Describing food in the Roman quarter of Trastevere, Berkhuijsen’s original article reads:

THE FIRST ‘GOLDEN AGE’ IN PASTA HISTORY?

The last phrase above is fascinating. It’s evidence of a link in popular culture from Rome in 1939 between a recipe called “Spaghetti alla Carbonara” and the charcoal producers (‘carbonari’) of the regions surrounding Rome. Quite independently of this article, food historians have indeed suggested that Carbonara owes its name to the black pepper in some early versions of the recipe. It’s been interpreted as a metaphor for the charcoal produced by the ‘carbonari’ - and I think it’s clear that’s what Berkhuijsen is alluding to in her article.

It’s also a highly significant reaffirmation of how popular culture painted the origins of the dish: pepper = coal = a recipe rooted in history.

That’s huge. It could be one of the first instances of the phenomenon of recipes being remembered simply because of manufactured mythology. Made-up stuff. Food historians have described this process as part of a yearning for a ‘golden age;’ and I had always assumed it to be more evident in post-WW2 food writing. To find traces of this tendency of romanticising the past just weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War is both heartwarming and heartbreaking.

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Serves 2

A carbonara–pesto hybrid: a golden Pecorino and egg-yolk emulsion with pancetta and peas, finished with a loose ribbon of concentrated pesto rather than mixing the pesto into the sauce.

Ingredients

200 g trenette or linguine
80 g pancetta dolce, diced
100 g peas
4 egg yolks
50 g Pecorino Romano, finely grated
Freshly ground black pepper
2 desse…

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Extensive searches have shown that the recipes I cooked and published below appear to be the earliest known recorded UK publications of these dishes. These findings are based on the searchable evidence located so far and will be revised if an earlier British source emerges - please do get in touch if you know otherwise!

PASTA RECIPES FIRST PUBLISHED IN BRITAIN BY MARK GOWEN

The UK publication dates that appear to be the first recorded for the following recipes to date:

• Spaghetti all’Assassina - 2 May 2022

• Rigatoni alla Zozzona - 11 Feb 2022

• Tagliatelle alla Papalina - 28 Dec 2021

• Tagliatelle alla Renaiola - 13 May 2022

• Spaghettoni alla Trasteverina - 2 Dec 2021

• Roman Lagane with Leeks - 13 Jan 2022

• Pici all’Etrusca - 29 May 2022

• Spaghettoni Pizzati - 8 May 2022

• Focaccette di Recco / Megli - 24 Jul 2021

• Sweetcorn Pesto - 30 Jul 2022

• Paccheri in Octopus Ragù - 6 Nov 2021
  

PASTA RECIPES FIRST PUBLISHED WORLDWIDE BY MARK GOWEN

No earlier published versions of the following recipes have yet been located. On the evidence currently available, I appear to have been the first to publish them anywhere in the world:

• Coffee tagliatelle with duck ragù - 19 Dec 2022

• Spaghetti alla Zozzonara - September 2026

• Spaghetti alla Pestonara - September 2026

• Spaghetti in Stracchino Sauce with Marmalade - 2 Feb 2022

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recipe notes
a confession
three varieties
the great puttanesca debate
the history
Recipe: Spaghettoni Pizzati

recipe notes

A CONFESSION

This is a bit of a cheeky recipe because… we’re just making a variation of Spaghetti alla Puttanesca with… added cheese. However, having said that, I think this is actually a really interesting and alternative way to make Puttanesca. I actually find myself making this variation rather than ‘classic,’ cheeseless Puttanesca, most of the time now.

‘Pizzati’ (plural), basically pizza’d - you might have seen the adjective applied to chicken, veal, steak or even focaccia in Italy. It simply means to make taste like a pizza… which is quite easy when it comes to Spaghetti alla Puttanesca because we’re only missing the mozzarella!

AVAILABLE IN THREE VARIETIES

My rather genius creation actually comes in 3 varieties… Spaghetti Pizzati Rossi (Red), Rosi(Pink) or Bianchi (White). I wonder if you can guess why?

Full marks if you guessed simply how much tomato goes into the mix. As you become a connoisseur of Spaghettoni Pizzati and find your faction, you’ll perfect exactly how much tomato (and what kind of tomato) to put into the recipe. I’ve used poppa, double-concentrate, and fresh baby plum tomatoes. But as the first rule of Spaghetti Pizzati Club is that there are no rules about how much tomato you use, I’m going to leave all that sort of stuff entirely up to you.

THE GREAT PUTTANESCA DEBATE

While we’re on the subject of Puttanesca, maybe it’s time to sweep away an urban myth… but I may well return to cover Puttanesca history properly in another article.

You’ve almost certainly heard someone, somewhere, regurgitate the story about Puttanesca being invented in the backstreet brothels in Naples - the one where ‘Spaghetti alla Puttanesca’ is endlessly translated, badly, as ‘whore’s spaghetti’ / ‘slutty spaghetti’, and so on.

The story that tells you Puttanesca was a pungent, slightly spicy, strongly flavoured ‘pick-me-up’ dish; a quick, after-quickie pasta that your favourite hooker would rustle up for you right after you’d concluded the night’s business.

The story that was brought to you by at least 10 whole seconds of internet research.

Italian food is full of folksy, contrived, ‘origin stories’ that merely amount to sentimental rubbish. Invented and re-invented myths thought up as a means to prop up business or local pride and patriotism; ‘campanilismo’ (which I’ll also cover in a forthcoming article!).

THE HISTORY

And with Puttanesca, there are documented nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Neapolitan pasta dishes using combinations of the ingredients we now associate with this sauce… so… as with many other pasta dishes, it’s a case of the combination of flavours and ingredients coming first, and then the name coming later.

But the combination of many of Puttanesca’s ingredients had been established for over a hundred years before that. In the 19th century, Ippolito Cavalcanti’s Cucina teorico-pratica included a a recipe for “Vermicelli all’oglio con olive, capperi, ed alici salse” — vermicelli with oil (then written ‘oglio’), olives, capers and salted anchovies. Later, in 1931, the Guida Gastronomica d’Italia records Maccheroni alla Marinara from the Campania region of the south of Italy, with ingredients much closer to what we'd now recognise as Puttanesca: fresh tomato sauce cooked with oil, garlic and parsley, with capers and olives.

And guess what? No mention of the oldest profession anywhere.

But let’s jump back to the 1960s… Puttanesca… “in the style of a whore?!?!?” It was a ballsy, eyebrow-raising name, just right for the post-war generation. It stuck.

For those interested in what I think is one of the most likely origins of the modern recipe name, the name was supposedly coined in the 1950s on the Island of Ischia. Near closing time one night the owner of a local restaurant was pestered by a group of hungry customers to rustle up whatever he could for them, pleading ‘facci una puttanata qualsiasi,’ literally, ‘make us any kind of puttanata,’ or as we might say, ‘just make us any kind of shit.’ *

Maybe the chef was aware of the older combination of ingredients, maybe he wasn’t, but all he could find in the kitchen were tomatoes, olive, capers and anchovies. He threw in a chilli for good measure. The drunks loved it, as did he, and he stuck it straight on the restaurant menu.

* NB It’s interesting that we use the word shit in English as a multi-purpose swear word, whereas the Italians tend to use ‘whore.’ And frankly I’m pretty glad they do. I’m really not sure that Shitty Spaghetti would have worked.

Mark Gowen’s Spaghettoni Pizzati (Rossi)

FOR 4 PORTIONS

• 400g tomato polpa / fresh tomatoes

• 1 mozzarella ball

• 2 tblspns black olives

• 1.5 tblspns capers

• 1 large clove garlic

• fresh basil

• 4 anchovy fillets

PASTA

• 400g dry spaghettoni / spaghetti / linguine

MANTECATURA

• none, simply combine using pasta water

method

prepare the ingredients
Weigh and prep the ingredients. NB The White version omits all tomatoes; the Pink substitutes a jar of sun-dried tomatoes in olive oil, cut finely, for the polpa. Cut the mozzarella into smallish cubes and tear a large handful of basil leaves. Chop the anchovies very finely, crush the garlic.

Rossi (red) version - make the sauce
Begin by making a tomato sauce with either fresh plum tomatoes or a tin of tomato polpa. If you’re using raw tomatoes, fry them in EVO with a crushed clove of garlic. Allow the tomatoes to cook down, adding water if need be, until they've formed a thick sauce - this will take between 20 and 30 minutes. If you’re using polpa, begin by gently frying the garlic in EVO for 60-90 seconds (without browning it) and then add the polpa - then add the capers and olives simmer for 15 minutes.

Rosi (pink) version - make the sauce
Drain the sun-dried tomatoes and chop them into fine slivers. Fry gently in EVO, together with the capers and olives, with a splash of wine, for 5 mins, then add the crushed garlic and simmer for another minute, then set aside.

boil the pasta
Boil the pasta until it’s cooked to your liking - for me that means a chewy ‘al dente’ - no firmness or inner hard, uncooked pasta remaining in the strands, just a pleasant, chewy ‘toothsomeness’ - which is a word I discovered recently in an antique cookbook. It needs to be rediscovered.

combine the sauce and pasta
Put 2 ladles or so of the sauce in a tossing pan and fish the cooked pasta out of the boiling pan and add it directly to the sauce. On the heat, toss to combine, throwing in a big handful of freshly torn basil leaves and adding tiny amounts of pasta water and more sauce as required. (Tomato sauces are generally juicy enough not to need starchy ‘mantecatura’ - final cooking with sauce and pasta water…. so don’t be tempted to make baby food!).

Turn off the heat and at the very last moment, throw in the chopped mozzarella and quickly fold it through the dressed pasta. The more you mix and the longer you take the more you risk the mozzarella melting and ending up in one big ball… so work quickly.

Plate each portion, sprinkling on the chopped anchovies, grated pecorino, and either black or cayenne pepper.

nutrition per serving (rossi): 566 kcal

fat: 15.2g • saturates 4.9g
carbohydrate: 78.8g • sugars 9.2g
protein: 23.7g • fibre 4.2g
salt: 2.47g

more recipes

more food history

setting the scene
under the spell
food rationing: the unattainable Carbonara dream
it’s Carbonara, but not as we know it
Theodora the explorer
first impressions
the recipe: how it eats, what it tells us
the very first British Carbonara
is this recipe Carbonara without ‘coal’ ?
the impact of food rationing

setting the scene

UNDER THE SPELL

Something a little momentous was going on in Trastevere, Rome in the late 1940s and early 1950s, but of course no one realised it at the time.

Quite separately and independently, two British authors fell under the spell of one of Rome’s latest recipes - Spaghetti alla Carbonara - and both writers subsequently included it in the cookbooks they were writing. That’s how 1952’s Cosmopolitan Cookery in an English Kitchen (Theodora FitzGibbon) and 1954’s Italian Food (Elizabeth David) came to thrust the eggiest pasta sauce the world had ever seen in front of an incredulous Britain.

That’s a pivotal moment in pasta history…. in social media history. Because without FitzGibbon and David, today the internet would be limping along on kittens, Get-Ready-With-Me, Police Chase and Eyeshadow videos.

Perhaps both authors had indeed been so captivated by Carbonara’s novel ingredients and approach to pasta sauce that they simply felt obliged to introduce the recipe to 1950s Britain.

Their timing, however, couldn’t have been worse.

THE UNATTAINABLE DREAM

Britain in 1952 wasn’t a great time to try and cook pasta, or in fact anything remotely interesting. Wartime food rationing was still in place, and would drag on for a further two years. Whilst some basic foods like bread and flour were slowly becoming more readily available, other staples like sugar, butter and meat (including bacon) remained tightly controlled.

Pasta was mostly known in its tinned form, with early convenience food products like Heinz Spaghetti being already well established for several decades. Olive oil wasn’t even classed as a cooking ingredient, and wouldn’t really be for another couple of decades. If you wanted to buy olive oil in the 1950s, you’d need to visit your neighbourhood chemist, where it was sold as a remedy for earache, sunburn and constipation.

Even worse, dry spaghetti and parmesan were seen as exotic specialities, sold exclusively in high-end city delicatessens or niche, small Italian grocers - in areas like Soho or Clerkenwell in London, the heart of the city’s Italian community.

Yet that’s the reality which FitzGibbon’s and David’s readers would have encountered. Spaghetti alla Carbonara would have undoubtedly struck them, as it had the authors, as a stunningly beautiful dream on a plate - but how could anyone ever cook it?

IT’S CARBONARA, BUT NOT AS WE KNOW IT

Given all of that, I’m pretty sure many readers would have seen both recipes as ‘must-try-whenever-we-can’ meals. Familiar, loved ingredients - magically transformed into a foreign and exotic dish. The perfect mix to create an aspirational meal for a population bored to death of years of repetitive ration eating and dinner parties that never were.

THEODORA THE EXPLORER

Ham, eggs and pasta. Today of course you’d be forgiven for thinking it ordinary, but consider for a moment the impact Theodora’s Carbonara might have had back then. That’s quite hard for us to do. But imagine, a pasta sauce without a tomato in sight; in their place, a buttery sauce made with ham and eggs. Unknowingly, perhaps, Theodora was exploring a genuinely undiscovered country.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

We might call it an indulgent recipe, in a way; a fairly restrained way… but I think it would have absolutely been seen as an indulgent recipe in early 50s Britain.

We might say it’s a recipe with a certain air of refinement and class, but perhaps think it doesn't amaze.

But I think even today it’s a recipe that knows it doesn’t need to try too hard. It can whisper its credentials in a confident, matter-of-fact way and know you’ll always remember its roots; the taste of a very different pasta and a very different Britain.

When you try it, and I hope you do, just let Theodora’s Carbonara take you back to the Britain of the 1950s.

I promise you everything about this understated pasta will suddenly make sense.

You can see where Theodora FitzGibbon’s Carbonara sits in the historical carbonara recipes by clicking the diagram above, in the ‘Team Eggs’ segment.

the recipe: how it eats, what it tells us

We’re so used to seeing crispy pig on Carbonara that Theodora’s Carbonara looks, with its pale pink ham and minimalist appearance… a little under-done and unfinished.

However, a couple of huge things to consider here.

IT’S THE VERY FIRST BRITISH CARBONARA

First, take a look at the diagram above. We’re very early on in the timeline of published Carbonara recipes - excluding the Liberation Carbonara of 1944, which never appeared in print at the time, Theodora’s is one of the three earliest Carbonara recipes ever published - along with the Fabrizi Carbonara (Croix du Nord, 20/4/1952) and the Chicago Carbonara (Vittles & Vice, Patricia Bronté, 12/1952).

However, Theodora’s was almost certainly the first Carbonara recipe that British home cooks would have encountered. Italian actor Aldo Fabrizi’s recipe had appeared in a regional French newspaper, while Patricia Bronté’s was buried in a Chicago restaurant guide published only in December 1952. Theodora’s book also went on to be reprinted in 1953 and again in 1960, meaning it carried considerable influence for the way Carbonara was cooked in Britain at that time, even allowing for variations like Elizabeth David’s Carbonara.

PEPPER: IS THIS RECIPE ‘CARBONARA’ BEFORE THE ‘COAL’?

A second consideration. Look at the ingredients of the first five ‘Team Eggs’ Carbonaras. Fabrizi likes pepper, as does Cucina Italiana - but British and American cooks aren’t even told that back pepper is a main ingredient of the sauce. That’s potentially at odds with the theory of the recipe’s name deriving from the charcoal burners of central Italy (i.e. that pepper is a representation of charcoal). Subsequent recipes in the 1960s and later fluctuate between including and omitting black pepper - which begs the question, when and why did Carbonara first acquire its ‘carbone’ ?

We currently have no information about the ingredients of the Trastevere Carbonara of 1939, which is the first recipe we know of called ‘Carbonara.’ It may or may not have contained pepper. However, our ‘mitochondrial Eve’ recipe, Strascinati of 1931, DID include pepper, as did the two dishes I see as contributing to Carbonara’s original emergence: Cacio e Ova and Pasta alla Gricia. Both of these related recipes included pepper… so the mystery of why Theodora chose to omit the spice from her recipe remains.

FOOD RATIONING

NB I’ve reproduced the original ingredients below, together with my tweaks. Cooking the recipe as published delivers a pretty dry and austere result, which is the tell-tale consequence of the author writing for the ingredient availability of the time: WW2 and rationing has ultimately delivered much more parsimonious ingredient quantities than we’re accustomed to today.

When I cooked the recipe a second time I increased the quantities of some of the ingredients, which I think may have been a more accurate recreation of whatever pasta Theodora originally ate in Rome.

In the introduction to her book, Theodora does say that when she returned to Britain—about three years before writing the book—she had heard alarming accounts of the ‘impossibility of surviving on the rations.

I think it’s clear that Theodora is taking pains to make readers aware that the recipes in the book have been written with many of the original ingredients substituted, to cater for what foods might be available in Britain - but that hasn’t deterred her from writing the recipes she wanted to write, in fact she says “…a good substitute is far superior to ignoring the recipe..”

Seen in that light, Theodora’s Spaghetti Carbonara appears to be a much more extravagant dish, needing not insignificant amounts of ham, butter, egg and two different cheeses.

And all of that, of course, presents the choice of cooked ham - along with Gruyére, as the ingredients most likely to have been substituted. Yes, there’s a chance that whatever Carbonara Teodora ate in Rome was made with Gruyére and parmesan, but I think it’s far more likely that those were the most practicable cheese and meat substitutes she could find.

Butter is a tricky ingredient to explain - it could have been chosen to make up for the missing fat from a fattier cut of pork, or it might have been simply an addition to raise the status of the dish.

Whatever the answers, I’d like to think that Theodora would have still been able to recognise her recipe in my interpretation here.

Spaghetti Carbonara, Theodora Fitzgibbon (1952)

FOR FOUR PEOPLE

original ingredients

• 340g / ¾ lb freshly made spaghetti

• 115g / 4oz cooked ham, chopped

• 2 egg yolks

• 15g / 1 tbsp butter

• 115g / 4oz Gruyère, grated

• 55–60g / 2oz Parmesan, grated

my tweaks

• 400g dry spaghetti

• 140g / 5oz cooked ham on the bone, torn

• 4 egg yolks

• 30g / 2 tbsp butter

• 120g / 4¼ oz Gruyère, grated

• 60g / 2oz Parmesan, grated

method

Theodora’s original method is:

And let me confess there are a few ‘period’ touches there that I simply can’t bring myself to adopt.

First, boiling the pasta for 20 minutes - I just can’t. My spaghetti were cooked to a slightly chewy, ‘al dente.’ Secondly, I have to confess to preferring to mix both cheeses with the yolks and whisk them together before adding to the cooked pasta - this is clearly a more modern technique but I think it guarantees a result closer to what Theodora’s written - that we shouldn’t allow the eggs to cook at all.

Lastly, notice that Theodora wants us to ‘melt the butter, chopped ham and Gruyére’ together; my interpretation of that is that the cooked ham shouldn’t be crisped or coloured at all.

prepare the ingredients

Grate the cheese, tear the ham, separate the yolks.

boil the pasta

Boil the pasta and when it’s half done, melt the butter in a tossing pan and being to warm the ham gently.

make the ‘sauce’

Whisk the cheese and yolks together.

toss and combine

When the pasta’s very nearly done to your liking, fish it out of the boiling pan and add to the ham and butter in the tossing pan, with perhaps a tiny splash of cooking water. Mix, toss, and then let the spaghetti rest for a minute or two, so that the temperature drops slightly and you’re less likely to make scrambled eggs when you…

Add the egg mixture to the pasta, toss, add small amounts of cooking water if it needs to loosen up, then plate and serve immediately.

give me the next Carbonara

more recipes

more food history

recipe notes
how I started making pesto
the quest for authentic pesto
Pragmatic Pesto
tips for perfect pesto
Recipe: Pesto Genovese
Pesto tips and trivia
the pesto factions

I was lucky enough to be able to stare at this amazing view every single summer of my childhood. It’s from near my grandmother’s house on the Italian Riviera in the small village of Polanesi, to the East of the city of Genova, looking towards Camogli and Portofino Mountain. Portofino itself and the Cinque Terre are a little further down the coast.

On holiday in Italy absolutely everyone cooked, from my grandmother to my aunts and all of my uncles. It might sound sugary and syrupy but that’s honestly how it was - focaccia on the beach, after dinner strolls for gelato, decades of family reunions and every single hello and goodbye with my dearest relatives and every friend I can think of, all with food in common.

And it was there, in the summer of 1977, that I ate pesto for the first time.

recipe notes

HOW I STARTED MAKING PESTO

I want to share what’s been a recipe in development for over 40 years, since I started preparing it as a teenager.

In the 1980s you couldn’t go out and buy a pot of growing basil from a supermarket like you can today. You had to grow basil from seed. And that’s what I did; starting somewhere around 1984, each spring I grew as many trays of basil as I could and - eventually - made my first homemade pestos. Germinating and growing outdoors in South Wales made the basil pretty robust tasting, but I was overjoyed that I’d finally been able to make one of my favourite pastas.

And what a long way we’ve come - today most of us are maybe half an hour away from getting our hands on basil we can make pesto with, compared with the 6-8 weeks I had to wait in 1984.

Over the years I’ve tweaked and adjusted my pesto recipe - using supermarket basil when that first became available; for cheese, first parmesan alone and then pecorino and parmesan together when that appeared.

My only main substitutions now are having to use the shorter, fatter, ubiquitous Chinese pine nuts instead of the longer, creamier and more delicate Italian variety, and a mix of standard olive oil and extra virgin olive oil, instead of Ligurian Olive oil - which is milder then EVO but more flavourful than standard. And that’s where I was more or less over lockdown, when I was writing my book Pasta & Magic: Pesto Sauces, and I finally settled on a definitive pesto recipe.

PRAGMATIC PESTO

Many of you are interested in recreating historic recipes as close to how they would have been prepared in the past. I am too. In fact, I’m in the process of writing a book about historic recipes, and I’m adopting exactly this approach.

One of the reasons that people are drawn to recreating historic recipes is that they’re seen as the definitive, original, ‘authentic’ versions. The ones with the ‘proper’ ingredients and traditional methods. The ones where you can taste history. And that’s fine - I love the tangible link to the past and other generations too… but when it comes to recipe names or descriptions, ‘authentic’ and ‘traditional’ are some of my least favourite words to read. Right up there with ‘Trump’ and ‘Farage.’

And here’s why.

THE QUEST FOR AUTHENTIC PESTO

Pesto, like many other Italian recipes, didn’t just suddenly spring into being. The recipes we cook today are variations of a combination of ingredients that have gradually become codified over the decades. So saying a pesto is ‘authentic’ normally only refers to the most recent, contemporary version of the dish (unless there’s been a very recent, sudden change in its ingredients / techniques). And bizarrely, we often never assign the label ‘authentic’ to the earliest recorded versions of recipes, instead preferring to adopt more recent variations as sacred canonical dishes.

AUTHENTIC - BUT TO WHEN?

One of the first ‘modern’ recipes we have for Pesto Genovese is from 1863 and a Genovese chef called Giovanni Battista Ratto, who tells us to use basil, garlic, DUTCH cheese and oil. Usefully, he says that if we can’t get hold of basil, marjoram or parsley will do nicely. Notice there’s no mention whatsoever of pecorino, parmesan, or pine nuts.

Spaghetti alla Carbonara and Ragù Bolognese have similar back-stories. Amongst the ingredients for some of the first published recipes for Carbonara were bacon or cooked ham, rather than today’s guanciale; gruyére or parmesan instead of the modern choice of pecorino, and other unexpected choices like garlic, cream and CLAMS. Yet no one chooses to label those as ‘authentic’ Carbonara recipes, even though they predate anything we’re cooking today.

Similarly, Ragù Bolognese, which most of the world’s population would describe as a rich, red pasta sauce. Yet in Pellegrino Artusi’s 1891 recipe, again one of the first recipes published, there isn’t a tomato in sight. It’s what we call today a ‘white’ ragù. But again very few people would refer to that as a recipe for ‘authentic Bolognese.’

ARSE-BACKWARDS

I find all of that more than a little topsy-turvy. Or as food historians like to say, arse-backwards. It’s as if we’re imposing our modern, ‘codified’ versions of recipes on the earlier examples, implying that somehow they’d got it wrong, that our version is better.

But I don’t think we should get to choose which is ‘authentic,’ or even ‘traditional’ (and let’s leave that other can of worms for another day). If your idea of authenticity is based on chronology, or simply what came first, you need to respect early versions of recipes. We’re not those cooks and it’s not our food anymore, but it’s a damn sight more faithful to history than what the influencers are raving about on Instagram.

Back to pesto.

Here’s my Trofie with Pesto Genovese with Beans and Potatoes, from this summer. It’s what most Ligurians would describe as ‘authentic’ pesto. Because if it’s pesto, it’s got to be trofie and two-veg, as they don’t say in Genova.

But as we’ve seen, beans and potatoes weren't in the early 1863 recipe. They’ve crept in over the generations, along with options to use pasta like corzetti, mandilli di seta or trenette.

PRAGMATIC PESTO

And then there’s HOW you make the pesto itself.

The purists/historical re-enactors will use a pestle and mortar to make their pesto (presumably because they like their food tech to show its age and heritage in millennia).

But when I’m cooking pesto at home I take a slightly more pragmatic view of the whole process (mostly because it’s quicker to chew a shipping container full of fruit pastilles than it is to make pesto with a pestle and mortar).

I make pragmatic pesto with my very clever electric pestle and mortar - my food blender.

And they tell me that’s wrong, that it’s not ‘real pesto;’ that I risk ruining the basil and also making the pesto too oily. Now, I’d agree that there’s sometimes marginally more oil needed if you use a blender, but that rather depends on the size of the your blender bowl and the quantity of basil you’re trying to blend. So in terms of oil content, the differences between pestling and blending can be negligible, and as you’ll see below, we can do really clever stuff to make sure our time saving tech still makes delicious pesto.

TIPS FOR THE PERFECT PRAGMATIC PESTO

• Chill the bowl and blade of the blender for at least 30 mins in the freezer before starting to make your pesto. The purists have a valid concern - if you raise the temperature of the basil leave too much they can turn black and acquire a bitter taste. To avoid this, start with an ice-cold blender bowl and blade and…

• Pulse-blend as you add each ingredient. DO NOT just press the button and walk away from the blender to do something less boring instead.

• NEVER USE ICE CUBES to lower the temperature of the pesto. Adding water to pesto at the blending stage is a spectacularly bad idea as it will (1) make for watery pesto and (2) shorten the shelf life (or rather FRIDGE life) of any pesto you need to store.

• Use slightly older, drier cheese rather than wedges that you’ve just unwrapped from their vacuum packing. I keep all my pasta parmesan and pecorino in the fridge cheese drawer wrapped only in paper kitchen towel. You’ll need to allow a week or so before your first wedges are ready to grate, but the difference you’ll see will be enormous. Instead of small, buttery curls that clog the grater and make a stodgy pesto, you’ll get light, snowflake-like whisps of cheesy goodness.

• use an old-school hole-punch grater rather than a microplane grater. You’ll get finer, more snowflake-like shavings of aged cheese, rather than the larger curls produced by a microplane. The finer the grated cheese, the better it will mix into a pesto.

• Buy pots of growing basil rather than the packets of ready-picked stalks with larger, more pointed, darker leaves grown in Africa or South America - they’re normally pretty bitter. Remember too that even growing plants in the colder seasons will give you stronger tasting leaves than those grown in warmer months.

Mark Gowen’s Pesto Genovese

FOR 6 PORTIONS

• approx 60g of a 50:50 mix of pecorino & parmesan

• 100g fresh basil leaves

• 120ml olive oil (50:50 mix EVO and Olive Oil)

• 1 large clove garlic

• 50g pinoli

• black pepper

• 300g fine beans

PASTA

• 600g dry trenette / linguine / trofie / corzetti / mandrilli di seta

MANTECATURA

• none, simply combine using pasta water

method

prepare the ingredients
Weigh and prep the ingredients. Pick the leaves by pinching the stalk as close to the leaf as possible, you want minimal stalk in the pesto. (If you wash the basil leaves, make sure they are as dry as possible before blending - I dry mine between tea cloths or kitchen towel.)

make the pesto
Using a blender, fit the bowl and blade you’ve previously chilled in a freezer for at least 30 mins to your blender. I start by pulse-blending all the leaves first, with a small pinch of salt. You can can go ahead and add all of the ingredients and continue pulse-blending - or, if you don’t trust my quantities, add a little of each, one at a time, until you have the balance of flavours you like.

pesto at room temperature
The pesto needs to be at room temperature before you start cooking, so allow at least half an hour for it to sit outside a fridge and come up to room temperature. It’ll mix much easier with the pasta and won’t cool the pasta down!

boil the beans / potatoes
If you’re going to serve your pesto with beans and/or potatoes, prepare the vegetables and boil them. Cut the beans into lengths about 30mm long and the potatoes into chunks the size of your thumb. Don’t overcook them.

At this stage, if you are cooking for others, make sure they’re sitting down at the table waiting for their food - if your guests are anything like my family, call them to the table at least 15 minutes in advance, make sure they’ve all washed their hands or used the bathroom or done whatever else they need to do before eating, and then tie them to their chairs.

boil the pasta
Boil and cook the pasta - when it’s done to your liking, put about half the total pesto into a pre-warmed tossing pan (warm it with some of the pasta cooking water, then discard it), and loosen it up with perhaps a third of a ladle of cooking water. Fish the pasta out of the cooking water and add it immediately to the tossing pan, off the heat.

combine
Toss to combine, adding more pesto and tiny amounts of cooking water if it feels too sticky, but don’t turn it into a runny mess. When the pasta and sauce are nicely combined, throw in the beans and potatoes. Toss and combine and then serve with lots of black pepper and grated pecorino or parmesan.

recipe video

Click here to view a recipe video on Instagram

nutrition per serving: 761 kcal

fat: 42.4g • saturates 8g
carbohydrate: 71g • sugars 4.1g
protein: 21.3g • fibre 3.8g
salt: 0.51g

pesto tips and trivia

We’re not doing much history of pesto today, but there are a few things you need to be aware of, when it comes to planning your pesto. Number one - and surprisingly - everyone, even in Genova, has an opinion. I’m sure this comes as something of a shock to you, as we’re so used to Italians always speaking with one voice and never disagreeing about recipes, ingredients or techniques.

In Genova, Pesto is a pretty serious matter of involving a handful of related but very, very different factions. I’m not sure if there are websites, flags or t-shirts available (there must be somewhere), but for now simply be aware of the following pesto creeds.

the pesto factions

Within those core pesto factions, there exist a number of shadowy sects:

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I don’t even like Carbonara that much, yet here I am, trying to make sense of the original shape-shifting pasta—and from a decidedly British point of view too. I want to work out how we started cooking Carbonara in Britain in so many different ways, following the recipes back as far as we can to uncover when—or if, or perhaps why—we started cooking pasta with eggs and cheese and pig our own way.

I want to go in search of Authentically British Carbonara.

A Cunning Plan

I’m going to try something possibly quite foolish. I’m going to try and reconstruct Carbonara’s DNA by combining historical recipes, studies, my own research, recipe recreations and my own original recipes to figure out how we got to the Carbonaras we’re cooking today in Britain. But I think it might be fun too to try and guess where that road might be taking us.

I’m massively indebted to the work of, amongst others, Luca Cesari, Alberto Grandi, Janneke Vreugdenhil, Edwin Winkels and of course the original chefs, restaurants and recipe authors - all of whom have inspired me to try and join these Carbonara dots.

The Key Recipes… and Ingredients

Let’s dive in and get controversial straight away.

Over the course of this miniseries I’m going to be recreating some of the most significant recorded recipes for Carbonara. And to help me do that, I’ve made a little diagram - which you can see full-size by clicking the link or graphic below.

And I can hear the teeth-sucking already. No, the 1931 recipe isn’t called ‘Carbonara’ and yes, it contains ingredients that aren’t regarded as canonical in Contemporary Carbonara. I’m not claiming that every subsequent carbonara descends from 1931 Strascinati, but it is the earliest documented dish we’ve found that brings together so much of Carbonara’s later ingredients.

The Ingredients and Chronology panels should make interesting reading for modern day Carbonara Purists…

That’s the kind of fun we’re going to be having in this series, together with history and theories and of course recipe recreations.

I’m excited. I hope you are too.

read more Food History

Making pesto from capers can be tricky - mostly because of how capers tend to be stored. They’re normally bought preserved in vinegar or salt, and having a pesto which is either too salty or vinegary is really quite unpleasant. I’d advise mixing both types of capers, if you have them. With both varieties, make sure you let them sit in water for a couple of hours, ideally all day, before making the pesto. If you haven’t got all day to wait, soak the capers in boiling water for at least 30 mins, check their saltiness, and possibly repeat.

Pappardelle with Caper Pesto and Scallops

FOR FOUR

• 250g large scallops

• 200g small scallops

PESTO

• 30g salted capers

• 50g capers in vinegar

• 40g flaked almonds

• 28g pinoli

• grated parmesan (approx 40g)

• 30g basil leaves

• 5g flat parsley leaves

• 1 large garlic clove

• EVO

PASTA

400g fresh egg pappardelle

MANTECATURA

none, simply combine

Method

• make the pesto

Unlike my other recipes for pesto, I’m giving a more precise indication of quantities for this dish - but there will still be a certain amount of adjusting flavours ‘to taste’ at the blending stage. Just begin by pulse blending small quantities of each of the ingredients and adding enough oil to help the blender do its work. If you prefer a smoother pesto, omit or reduce the almonds and just use pinoli.

• sear the scallops

Once you’ve blended the pesto and reached the balance of flavours that’s right for you, let it sit at room temperature for half an hour or so before you start to boil the pasta. At this point you can sear the scallops - I do this in a heavy iron pan which has been wiped with oil and then heated until it’s very hot. Place the scallops in the pan and after 30 seconds turn off the heat, turning each scallop individually to cook on the other side with the residual heat in the pan. Smaller scallops will take about 4-5 min cooking time and larger ones about 6-7 min. Don’t under-cook OR overcook them!

• boil the pasta

Boil and cook the pasta - when it’s done to your liking, put about half the total pesto into a pre-warmed pasta wok, and loosen it up with perhaps a third of a ladle of cooking water. Fish the pasta out of the cooking water and add it immediately to the pasta wok, off the heat.

• combine

Toss to combine, adding more pesto and tiny amounts of cooking water if it feels too sticky, but don’t turn it into a runny mess. When the pasta and sauce are nicely combined, throw in half the scallops. Toss and combine and then plate each portion, sharing out the remainder of the scallops as a topping.

Nutrition per serving

• KCAL: 681

• Fat (g): 44.6

• Sat Fat (g): 7.0

• Carb (g): 35.3

• Sug (g): 1.7

• Fibre(g): 5.2

• Prot (g): 33.5

• Salt (g): 2.96

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BBC Radio 4 is devoting today to the Normans, in celebration of the opening of the Bayeux Tapestry exhibition at the British Museum. I’ve just listened to the special edition of The Food Programme which asks what the Norman Conquest did for our diet… and I was heartbroken to discover there was no mention of pasta.

Maybe we should add some.

Over 200 years after the Norman Conquest of Britain began, during the last few decades of the 13th Century, an English scribe sat down and began copying Anglo-Norman passages onto a freshly prepared leaf of vellum. Among them was the record of Cressee, a dish now thought to preserve Britain’s earliest surviving pasta recipe.

More than 700 years later, we can still read the finished manuscript in the British Library, but the origins and historical transmission of its recipes remain uncertain. Could it have been an Anglo-Norman food or an older recipe concept that travelled much further, through the Norman network that stretched from Britain to the Kingdom of Sicily?

I wasn’t there, so I don’t know. But what I think what we can say with certainty is that Cressée is evidence that, by the end of the thirteenth century, sophisticated knowledge of pasta preparation was circulating in England. These techniques were being recorded many decades before The Forme of Cury, often described as the first British cookbook.

Except it isn’t.

The title by which we know it comes from an edition published by Samuel Pegge in 1780. Its preface attributes the recipes in The Forme of Cury to “the chief Master Cooks of King Richard II,” and the collection itself is dated to around 1390. Written in Middle Englis The Forme of Cury includes ravioles, a filled pasta equivalent to modern ravioli; makerouns, pasta pieces cooked and served with butter and cheese; and losyns, thin pasta sheets resembling an early form of lasagne.

But of course the Anglo-Norman recipes in the British Library pre-date The Forme of Cury by about one hundred years. Not only that, but they include other recipes for pasta dishes viewed as the forerunners to many other recipes that we still cook today. The Anglo-Norman ravieles were stuffed pasta. Kuskenole were filled pastries and could be the ancestor of modern British pies and pasties. And cressee were flavoured and coloured pasta squares.

Together, those three recipes read almost like a tool-kit of pasta techniques; knowledge that English scribes and compilers in the 13th century thought important enough to preserve. And it’s thanks to those records that I think we can reasonably infer that some cooks, probably at an elite level of Anglo-Norman society, were preparing them.

It’s tempting to examine the Norman contribution to British cuisine, even to state that by the end of the 13th century pasta dishes were on the way to becoming British foods. But I think the real question, though, is how these foods entered the Northern European cooking tradition in the first place.

That’s one of the questions that my next book, The History We Never Ate, will attempt to answer.

more food history

And that’s nothing whatsoever to do with that clown Mussolini’s attempt to Italianize french ragoût . Back in the 1930s the fascist initiative to introduce ‘ragutto’ flopped resoundingly.

So here you are - Hand-pulled fresh pici with Salmon Ragù / RAGUETTO al Salmone.

I used to call recipes like this a ‘fake Ragù‘ but today I’m officially launching the RAGUETTO… a sauce that you desperately want to seem like a Ragù but because of the ingredients or the time you have available needs to cook in a fraction of the time…

I struggle with the idea of poached salmon and tomatoes - I can never bring myself to put them together in a sandwich, there’s something that doesn’t quite work …. But last night, for the first time, I threw an improvised fish Ragù together with just a handful of ingredients, including TOMATOES and salmon.

And it worked. Fishy. Thymey. Tomatoey. Fresh. The world’s first RAGUETTO brought to you from still-relatively-sunny South London. In fact, damn it, from henceforth I declare the 25th August shall be RAGUETTO day. And guess what? You were here to witness the first.

SALMON RAGUETTO

FOR TWO

• one salmon fillet per person

• 270g baby plum/mini San Marzano tomatoes

• 1 small grated clove of garlic

• olive oil

• a large handful of capers

• fresh thyme

• hand-pulled, fresh pici / fresh tagliatelle / fresh pappardelle / dry spaghettoni / dry fettuccine

Grate the garlic, warm it gently in EVO for about 60 seconds, no frying or colouring. Add the tomatoes, cut in half and cook gently for 5-10 minutes. Allow the, to break down and add a splash of water if need be. In the meantime, dry-fry the salmon fillets in your best non-stick pan. Throw a handful of capers in half way through the cooking - not too early or you’ll get cremated, bitter fossils. If the capers are looking too toasted, remove them from the pan and put them to one side to use in the final plating later. Rub some of the thyme together in your hands over the simmering sauce. Give it a hint of herbs, nothing over-powering. Boil and cook the pasta, flake the cooked salmon and discard the skin. When the pasta’s past ‘al dente’ and is about to get ‘chewy’, fish it out of the boiling pan and transfer straight to the tomato sauce. Toss to combine. sprinkle on the flaked salmon and toss some more. Plate. Loads of black or cayenne pepper on the top.

TO MAKE FRESH PICI

Make a simple plain flour and water pasta dough - 2:1 flour to water (so 300g flour + 150ml water etc). Need the dough for 10 mins then cover with cling film and rest in a fridge for 30-45 mins. Roll out small sections of the dough by hand to about 3mm thickness then cut those into strips about 6mm wide. Separate each rectangular section strip and roll and tease it into a thick strand about 3-4mm wide. Keep going.

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Long before 'Spag Bol' was considered a pillar of British family food, advertisers were selling two main pasta products. Dry pasta for cooks to prepare at home and ready cooked tinned pasta. Those last 4 words probably sound as terrifying to you as they do to me. However the history of how these early convenience products were marketed gives us a fascinating insight into how pasta spread outside Italy and how Britain and America rapidly adopted it as their own food.

In the early years of the 20th century, dry pasta was almost certainly consumed in greater quantities than tinned pasta. Tinned pasta, however, may have had a greater effect on consumers' knowledge and a stronger influence on how pasta became integrated in American and British cuisine.

From an advertiser's point of view, packets of dried pasta were a relatively easy product to market.

Advertising ready-cooked spaghetti, on the other hand, meant that you had to explain the concept of an entire meal in the product's advertising. What it was, what it tasted like, why anyone should want to buy it. I find it fascinating to see how the process of educating the market for pasta developed over the decades, through recipes, serving suggestions and in the case of Heinz, endlessly repeated combinations of tomato, cheese, meat, eggs and bacon.

And from that we can see that early convenience-pasta advertising did much more than sell pasta. It taught non-Italian consumers how pasta could be combined with meals and ingredients they were already familiar with. It made it much easier for homecooks to find the confidence to try the product and experiment with it. It was a perfect way to get to know a new, exciting and exotic food.

This 1916 Heinz ad is stuffed full of wonderfully 'period' copywriting... but to modern eyes looks like a confusing mix of product and brand awareness. From a period art direction point of view, it's fascinating.. An architectural border that evokes a Victorian exhibition or pavillion but typography and illustration in the central section that wouldn't look dated for perhaps 30 years. Heinz was selling a bold new concept in convenience food and needed the style of its advertising to mirror that.

Another US ad which is heavy on education, Skinner's dry spaghetti from 1919. At first glance it's betraying some possible market resarch pointing to consumers seeing pasta as a pretty limited cooking option: "Five Sauces to Make Spaghetti Different."

This is a genuinely creative approach to selling pasta to a non-Italian market and's a tragedy that 'toothsomeness' hasn't survived in our modern pasta advertising and I honestly wish that I could get hold of the booklet of '141 recipes, each one a different spaghetti, macaroni and egg noodle conceit.' The sauce recipes themselves clearly borrow more than a little from French cuisine but the most remarkable detail is that he “Italian” sauce was not tomato-based but a milk-based white sauce with green pepper and diced ham!

Comparing Skinner's advertising to Italian press ads of the same time reveals something else. Italian brands seem to take the view that they don't need to teach consumers how to cook pasta, concentrating, instead on product awareness, and brand 'unique selling points' in quality, manufacturing, packaging and so on.

The Pianigiani 1922 poster above is a much more refined and evolved than the previous examples above, and again it's an example of a type of advertising quite a few years ahead of its time - in fact to me it already looks like mature, modern brand advertising. No recipes, or serving suggestions, just an assumption that consumers will instantly identify with the poster's theme, the character of 'Pulcinella,' from the traditional 16th century Italian popular theatre known as 'Commedia dell'Arte.'

British audiences would come to know the same anarchic rogue in street performances; first as 'Punchinello' and then later as 'Mr Punch' in 'Punch and Judy' shows. Curiously, while British Mr Punch's character is driven by violence, Pulcinella's driving force is hunger : Italian Commedia dell'Arte shows would often feature a stock gag of the always desperately hungry Pulcinella continuously stuffing his face with huge handfuls of macaroni.

And that's exactly what we've got in the Pianigiani poster - an abstract but instantly recognisable visual reference to Pulcinella, combined with more than just a tinge of Mr Punch - 'that's how we eat [how we do it] in Naples!'

Nearly 40 years later in the UK , however, and we find only a few changes in this press ad from 1958-59. Heinz is still taking an educative approach but notice that they've finally moved on from having to explain what spaghetti in a tin is. There are clues to how they're going to be positioning their product over the coming years too. The graphics and headline explicitly address younger female consumers with recipe suggestions that are clearly quick, easy meals for one. A fried egg on a bowl of tinned spagheti is 'a nourishing and perfect lunch for a busy day' and the main image obviously substitutes baked beans for tinned spaghetti on toast. Heinz almost doesn't need to add supporting copy here - beans on toast had been popular UK convenience food for nearly 20 years by this time, though I get a sense that advertisers are still feeling like they need to fight against the social stigma of convenience foods.

That's just a small part of the history of how pasta spread through American and British kitchens - but the changing food habits and social trends they reflect are enormous. And they're part of the reason your kids love Spag Bol today.

more food history

At 9pm it’s still 29˚ in Sori and there’s something going on everywhere. Even in tucked away corners there’s music and chatter over the constant peal of bells from the church of Santa Margherita. I remember the start of the Madonna’s procession from the 1980s - first a huge crucifix and then a statue of Mary balanced on long poles
would set off to be paraded around the town,carried by the crusty, weathered cast of Pirates of the Caribbean. Sweating and shouting and jolts and gasps. Whispers of ‘Oh Dio!’ then applause and the Rosary and singing. And then repeat, all around town.
But there have been changes too; today everyone’s a little more manicured and it’s not flickering candles but a sea of glowing smart phones that greets the Madonna as she’s hauled out for her annual constitutional.

The Priest and the Mayor are there, straight out of ‘Don Camillo,’and as the Madonna sets off, she seems to be gliding through the streets. With the help of the two lead Carabinieri, the crowd parts to let the procession through, and I realise. They’ve put her on wheels! Walking just behind the Madonnamobile I watch her float above the locals, tourists, teenagers, street stalls, bars and restaurants. Not quite the opening to ‘La Dolce Vita,’ with the statue of Christ suspended from a helicopter, flying over Rome, but pretty close.

As we walk around the town some of the faithful begin to peel off to eat at the community kitchens set up in each of Sori’s quarters. By the time we’re reading the handwritten menu in ‘Forlandoli’ it’s clear the Madonna is tempting us. But she must want us to be happy, otherwise why show us all this incredible food? One last Hail Mary and as we recpectfully dash to join the queue for the Cassa, I promise the Madonna that even though I might eat all the primi I can I will defintely, defintely skip gelato just for tonight, Amen. Here’s what we ate.

The freshest made Ravioli ‘al Tuccu’ Genovese. These turned out to be a summer version and less heavy on the filling (normally there’s meat including offal, cheeses and greens, like borage), in a sauce (the ‘tuccu’) that tasted a lot like an incredible ragù, but with the addition of pine nuts, served with the meat ‘pulled.’ Below, the Ravioli in Salsa di Noce were just as fantastic, the filling being heavier on the greens than the Tuccu. I’ll be including versions of both of these in the forthcoming Pasta & Magic Tomato and Pesto Sauces books.

Pasta & Magic: Oil Sauces is available to buy now at: www.pastaandmagic.com

more food writing

Not Carbonara ….

Not Zozzona….

meet Spaghetti alla CARBOZZONA …. Or ZOZZONARA…. I can’t decide.. Eggs, pecorino, smoked bacon, sun dried tomatoes, smoked bacon and black pudding.

Ok, it’s a tongue-in-cheek recipe (no guanciale pun intended) and a little dig at the ‘carbonara police,’ but it actually works. Instead of using an equally eggy and tomato base (like with Zozzona), I’ve kept the traditional Carbonara base of pecorino and yolks and toasted black pepper …. Then for a hint of Zozzona I’ve included slivers of fried, sun dried tomatoes and smoked bacon and then topped everything with fried black pudding. Some of the bacon’s rendered fat goes into the pecorino and egg mix like you would with a classic carbonara, and to be honest I don’t miss the fatty guanciale. So there you are, an eggy Zozzona with black pudding.

M

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I stumbled across this in Siena last summer and have cooked it 3 / 4 times since. It’s now one of my favourite combinations of ingredients for oil -based pasta toppings…. Now, If you’re a regular follower you’ll know I dislike heavy pasta mantecatura (wallpaper paste-style) but I have to confess that these pici from Pasta Morelli lend themselves to more of a ‘velvety glaze’ than I would normally go for , but it works quite well as a winter dish….

Why do I go on about this? For me starch equals stodge and baby food; if you gravitate towards a lighter eating pasta dish be very careful with cooking dry pici like these and use a ridiculous amount of water - because the cooking times are longer than thinner pasta dry pici dump loads of starch into the cooking water. Go easy on any cooking water you add at the combining stage too and keep combining times to a minimum to avoid the stodge ….which I appreciate is nursery heaven to some…. Fresh pici are the obvious other alternative to get a lighter result and actually exactly what I was served in Italy….

Pici from @pastamorelli via @honoroakprovender , sausages and zucchini from @waitrose

Garlic from @garlic_farm, Isle of Wight

If you’d like to be a recipe tester for any of my dishes on Instagram for my book Pasta and Magic, DM me for that recipe spread from my book.

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Pici all’Etrusca

Pici all’Etrusca / Pici in an egg, garlic, basil, parsley, pecorino and mint pesto.

It’s an unusual, summery pesto that probably deserves to be better known than it is - pici all’etrusca.

I’ve seen this sauce pop up in southern Tuscany, which, as students of pasta and history will know is where the Etruscans ate their pasta …. I haven’t worked out what the Etruscan connection to this bizarre pesto mix is yet (maybe they were big on boiled eggs?) , but pici are supposed to have their roots, like me, in Southern Tuscany. So the name fits.

Dry pici from Pasta Morelli

FOR FOUR PEOPLE

For the pesto:

• boiled eggs (1 per person)

• 2-3 large cloves garlic

• large handful basil

• small handful parsley

• 3/4 leaves mint or to taste

• pecorino to taste

• EVO to taste

• To serve: fresh ground pink pepper, pecorino

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