With just a few exceptions, dairy-based sauces made from butter, milk, cheese or cream aren't as popular today as tomato or oil-based pasta recipes, but they're actually much older condiments for pasta that can be traced back thousands of years.
Some of the earliest pasta dishes were prepared with just these dairy ingredients though and I think it's fascinating to explore and experiment with these building blocks of Italian cooking.
Dairy based sauces can be completely, ridiculously over-the-top and stupidly calorific - but they can also be subtle and delicate. And they've always got fans.
butter and cheese
Butter first appeared in Italy thanks to the post-Roman 'Barbarian' invasions - before that, olive oil and animal fats were the main fats to be found in food of the time. The core combination of pasta + butter + cheese has been with us for centuries - food historians have found evidence of them being known in England as early as the Middle Ages and as the use of dry and fresh pasta spread and recipes began to be recorded, they were almost exclusively flavoured or dressed with butter and cheese; though sometimes cooking juices from meats and sweet spices like cloves, cinnamon or nutmeg were used too. The Renaissance saw more French / northern influence and the increased use of butter across, predominantly, Northern Italian regions, following the French invasions of Italy between the late 15th and early 19th centuries. However it's only really until after Napoleon's invasion of Italy in 1799, and the subsequent adoption of French tastes in Northern Italian culture, that we see cream becoming more of a feature in Italian dishes. But not until the 20th century does cream as part of a condiment for pasta really take off. Pasta's cream 'golden era' reached its height in the decadence of 1980s 'want it now' consumerism, and then promptly witnessed a gradual health/austerity backlash through the 1990s and 2000s. In recent years there's been an Italian resurgence of pasta sauces featuring cream - though this time around we're witnessing simpler recipes that include perhaps only one or two other main ingredients.
egg
No, eggs don't come from cows or goats. They're not made from milk either. But say hello to our honorary member of the Dairy category. Egg is often paired with 'real' dairy ingredients' and of course pops up in probably one of the most divisive pasta recipes today - Carbonara. Almost more than any other, this classic Roman sauce seems to polarise opinions. With the rise of social media the great C-word debate has been fuelled again and again, and foodies everywhere seem to feel obliged to show off their knowledge of what makes a ‘real’ Carbonara, its origins, and so on. Now, based on what I see regularly on social media, I have to say that a huge proportion of people haven't the slightest idea of where the sauce came from and how it was cooked for decades in Italy. Here’s a summary of why. (1) Carbonara wasn’t ‘invented’ in the 1940s during the liberation of Rome; I think the recipe we know today coalesced in the 1910s and 1920s. Why?Egg has been included in pasta dishes and sauces since at least the 18th century and the tradition of using egg and pig flavours was deeply seated in regional cooking traditions in central Italy. Indeed, just recently a claim widely reported in Italy was that Carbonara's true birthplace was the Umbrian town of Monteleone di Spoleto, and there is documentary evidence dating to 1494 describing the origns of a pasta shape locally called strascinati, served in an egg and pecorino sauce with guanciale and local sausage. The area was later a centre of charcoal ('carbone') production, and the possibly romanticised version of the story is that the Carbonari (charcoal producers) would need to rely on hearty recipes like this to sustain them through their hard physical work... so the theory is that the dish was named after them and later simplified slightly as it became adopted as a favourite dish in the Rome region (2) Guanciale - the buzz word for anyone in the know about Carbonara, right? Well, this unassuming little cut of pig has actually only been a relatively recent ‘mandatory’ ingredient, and a purist mantra only as recently as the 1990s / early 2000s. (3) Cream was a post-war US addition to the basic recipe, possibly influenced by another sauce from the 1930s, ‘Alla Papalina’, which in turn was based on the Carbonara combination of egg, cheese and pig. Websites endlessly regurgitate the 1940s origin myth of this simple pasta dish; that Carbonara was either invented for US troops liberating Rome in WW2, or that it was a dish created for an official dinner by a US Army chef using only the army rations and limited food supplies available to him. I don’t doubt that the universal hunger experienced in Italy after years of rationing during WW2 and also the previous hardships imposed by the Facist regime in the 1930s contributed to recipes that were amazingly creative and nutritious for the time, but (and I say this as a 100% amateur food historian) I do think it’s time to take a pragmatic look at the most likely origins of Carbonara.
a little food history
I’m very much an amateur food-historian… but I can Google stuff and I pretty good at joining the dots… so my starting point is to step back and just think for a moment at how, over the past several hundred years, recipes have passed into print. Sometimes they’re devised and written and published by an individual; sometimes they’re records of established food traditions, with an added tweak by the writer. And that’s one of the crucial bits. That and boredom. It’s the basic reason we keep buying cookery books. We see older recipes that we’ve cooked to death published with newer twists, we talk about them, share them on social media and soon they’re the thing your really must try to liven up boring ‘old’ recipe X… and then, over time, the newer recipe becomes the ‘best’ way to cook recipe X. I’ve spent a lot of time on social media recently on popular forums where photographs and recipes get shared and discussed. The main thing that’s hit me is the sheer variety of different treatments and versions that are possible with even the most well known and ‘traditional’ dishes. So it’s not that hard to imagine a world where we didn’t have video tutorials and access to so many ideas for cooking things differently. It’s also not hard to deduce that not all recipes will have ever been written down, shared, or even seen. Which brings me to this. Just because we don’t have a written record of it now, doesn’t mean that a recipe wasn’t ever tried or cooked in the past. And that’s how I’ve approached my research into older recipes. By all means criticise me for conjecture, and amateur-food historianism, But I think it’s perfectly valid to look at the documentary evidence we have for recipes that WERE published, and then to find out what other foods and ingredients might have been available at the time to any particular demographic, and then to try and work out what anyone with half a brain or passion for cooking might have experimented with in the past. No, I don’t know and no, I wasn’t there. But the stove I stand in front of isn’t that different from something that provided the heat to cook something 200 or 400 years ago. A home cook in late 19th century Italy wasn’t relatively less inventive or creative than you are. Just perhaps a little less well-read in recipes. And I think that’s at the root of what happened to Carbonara. We have evidence of the key ingredients in the modern recipe being cooked and eaten for hundreds of years. In the Strascinati with Egg & Pecorino Sauce with Guanciale and Sausage from Spoleto, we have records of a similar, if not exactly the same recipe dating back to the end of the 15th century. How likely is it that we just haven’t found a record of egg and guanciale and cheese on pasta? Maybe it just wasn't ever written down? Finally let’s not forget that a hundred years ago traditions of cooking and eating pasta were different and perhaps more limited than they are today. More traditionalist? Certainly less diffused in society, possibly a little less receptive to change and experimentation. My feeling is that people tended to stick with the tried and tested and established way of cooking foods, only deviating from them due to necessity or opportunity. And constraints and opportunities came in bucket loads in Italy in the first 50 years of the 20th century alone. WW1, domestic and political hardships and upheaval and food shortages under Facism; universal hunger during WW2. The boom of the post war period and the advent of consumerism. But through all of that, the need to cook and eat. So traditions and recipes adapt and evolve; they get forgotten, rediscovered, re-named and re-invented. So let's consider what the real history of Carbonara might have been.
the real history of carbonara
Much of the information you’ll find online about Carbonara focuses on its evolution from the end of WW2. You could be forgiven for reading it as bizarre celebration of the ‘first’ combination of egg and pork on pasta; almost an implication that no one had thought of adding egg to pasta dishes before that time… whereas in fact food historians have evidence of egg being used to thicken and flavour soups as early as the Middle Ages. And pancetta and/or guanciale and tomatoes had been happily enjoying themselves together in sauces like Amatriciana since the mid-19th century. As I've already mentioned above, a recent widely reported claim from the Spoleto and the village of Monteleone as being the birthplace of Carbonara may well be the root of the mystery. There we have a documented, precise recipe (pasta in an egg and pecorino sauce with guanciale and sausage) and a precise date - 1494. Moreover, the circumstances surrounding the invention of the recipe (the seige of a town and subsequent placation of the agressors by the local cok who invented the dish) are such that it was highly likely that the dish would pass into local folklore. And I think that's exactly what happened, and how egg and pig and cheese on pasta slowly became a traditional pairing of ingredients. This is underlined further In ‘A Brief History of Pasta’, where Luca Cesari quotes a recipe from the 18th Century Neapolitan cook, Vincenzo Corrado, combining egg and cheese. Corrado’s recipe, published in 1773 in his book ‘Il Cuoco Galante’, was for ‘thin pasta cooked in capon or beef broth served with eggs as a thickener’. I think it’s clear that this is evidence of a recipe picking up on the older combination of ingredients established in Spoleto in 1494, and proof that combinations of ingredients had passed into common or accepted use, becoming a tradtion. A hundred years later in the 19th century, Ippolito Cavalcanti publishes a recipe for ‘Maccarune de Tutte Manere’ which has pasta topped with ‘cheese and beaten eggs’ and in 1881 the Neapolitan Francesco Palma publishes a recipe for ‘Maccheroni con Cacio e Uova’. That recipe also added lard to eggs and cheese, and is just more documented evidence we have for the flavour combination of pig + cheese + egg. So what does all that give us? Answer - documentary evidence that recipes had been published over the course of at least 300 years which had established themselves as 'traditional' flavour combinations. Recipes that included egg and cheese and sausage and gunciale, egg and cheese and then egg and cheese and pig fat. Recipes that grew in popularity from the middle of the 19th Century and which I think, meant that it’s likely that there was a popular tradition of combining EGG and CHEESE and sausage or gunciale or pancetta in a sauce without tomato as early as the 1800s, certainly by the first decades of the 20th century. My suspicion is that it is during that period that 'classic’ carbonara actually emerged.
carbonara between the wars
The other really quite exciting thing for Italian cooking in the early 20th Century turned out to be WW1. Industry began to develop new ways of producing and storing and distributing food, including pasta, tinned and frozen foods. There was disruption to domestic food supplies and traditions and cooking habits were forced to change. By necessity, cooks at home began to improvise more than ever before. At the front, conscripts from different parts of the country with vastly different cultural backgrounds and experiences of food were thrown together. For many, army rations were the first chance for them to eat a more balanced diet of foods they had never heard of before. As food parcels from all parts of Italy arrived from family at home, the traffic of Ideas and traditions and recipes began to go back to family at home as soldiers returned from active service. As the 1920s wore on the emerging Fascist regime struggled with food shortages, Mussolini’s ambition was to build an empire to rival the largest world powers at the time, and Italy needed to seize foreign territories be wealth and increase food production. In a move to make Italy more self-sufficient, government propaganda encouraged the consumption of rice rather than pasta. From a cultural point of view, this seems utterly bizarre. Pasta, even at the time one of the greatest symbols of Italian identity, was suddenly deemed unhealthy and un-patriotic. However the government’s drive to increase cooking with rice wasn’t well received; with pasta remaining an incredibly popular part of the Italian diet, at least when it was available. It’s my feeling that this environment would have encouraged creativity and experimentation on the part of home cooks, and new recipes and combinations of ingredients would have been more common than a few decades earlier. I think all of this created the perfect environment for the recipe we know as Carbonara, with eggs and pig and cheese, to become a popular food tradition between the late 1910s and late 1930s. But a popular food tradition that was decidedly not high-brow or worthy of fine dining. Rather, a ‘make-do,' almost rustic tradition that caught on very quickly. And maybe that’s one of reasons that we don’t have any published recipes for it from that time. But no, I can’t brandish a recipe or even quote witness accounts. My grandparents, who lived through WW2 in Rome, are long dead; my late 88 year old mother clearly remembered wartime food rationing and black market ingredients in their middle class home, but had no recollection of a recipe called ‘Carbonara’ until at least the 1960s. What I can do, however, is point you to a fascinating piece of anecdotal evidence which could prove the existence of Carbonara as a local cooking tradition in the pre-war years. When I was researching another pasta sauce, Alla Papalina, I discovered accounts that it had been created for Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli at La Cisterna restaurant in Rome. Crucially, a number of sources reiterate, Alla Papalina was put together for Pacelli because he had specifically asked the restaurant’s chef for ‘a lighter’ version of the classic Roman Carbonara. We can date this with certainty to some time in the 1930s because Pacelli was a cardinal between Dec 1929 and 2 March 1939, when he became Pope Pius XII. So let's underline a key point - what was eventually named ‘Alla Papalina’ in the then Cardinal Pacelli’s honour probably came into being in the mid to late 1930s and was based on an existing recipe known as 'Carbonara’. In terms of the history of Carbonara, it could be THE smoking gun. Why? Because for Alla Papalina to be created in the mid to late 1930s, Carbonara would have had to be the label for an already established recipe in at least early 1930s Rome, probably even the 1920s. But the point is we're talking about a time around 15 years BEFORE US soldiers got anywhere near Rome in June 1944 and supposedly became homesick for ham and eggs!
and then there was cream
And so finally let’s consider another contentious ingredient of Carbonara. The inclusion of cream in the recipe. Food historians have rightly observed that recipes for Carbonara with cream begin to emerge in the 1950s in the United States and have pointed to this as the real ‘launch’ of the recipe. It finds its way back to Italy and on the back of the ‘invented during the liberation of Rome’ becomes increasingly popular over the next three decades or so until a more ‘traditional’ movement in Italy begins to pare the recipe back to simply meat, eggs and cheese. This is amplified with the advent of social media, which sees any other kind of pork but guanciale considered ‘inauthentic’ and anyone daring to use pancetta or bacon as amateurish and un-Italian. Touchingly reminiscent of Fascism, perhaps. This all tallies with my own exposure to Carbonara - my own first memory of the recipe was in the late 1970s in London - it was 1978 and a friend of the family, an Italian diplomat, took my mother, my brother and I to lunch in a well known Italian Soho restaurant. I remember vividly asking what Carbonara was, and then being amazed and delighted at what appeared in front of me…. Spaghetti in a cream sauce with bacon and black olives. But where did the cream come from? Was it a case of the US version finding its way back to Europe or were some restaurant chefs just trying to seem just a little bit more…. French?? Consider this. Following my Carbonara history above, and the assumption that Carbonara was existence perhaps as early as the 1910s-1920s, by the start of WW2 we have two quite similar recipes in existence in the Rome area. One for an egg and meat sauce (Carbonara) and another for a cream and meat sauce (Papalina). This is clearly and once again conjecture, but isn't it very likely that the two could easily have become confused and then found their way across the Atlantic post 1945, at least in the very top strata of chefs and food writers? Is Papalina the reason that cream starts being added to 'Carbonara' recipes in the USA in the 1950s? And then finds its way back to Europe? Does it matter? Is it that important? Probably not. But I think it's fascinating.