How a restaurant in Rome puts carbonara pasta to shame – 10/11/2023 – Cozinha Bruta

The London butcher smiled when I asked him for a piece of guanciale – pork jowl cured with salt.

“Good stuff, huh?” he told me as he wrapped up the parade. As if to test his reaction, I said: “I’m going to make a carbonara.” Then the guy started talking.

“You don’t use heavy cream, right?” I frowned and shook my head. Then the butcher pointed to a colleague: “This guy puts cream in his carbonara!” The offender smiled embarrassedly, showing his gums, which were almost completely devoid of teeth.

Pasta carbonara, in recent decades, has become a banner of Italian culinary orthodoxy. Not long ago, people used cream, ham, peas, béchamel – and no one paid any attention to such transgressions.

Italians clung to purism to propagandize that only they are capable of executing their country’s recipes well. It’s become folklore now.

You cannot cut spaghetti on the plate. You cannot, under any circumstances, serve pasta as an accompaniment to meat. You can’t make spaghetti with bolognese sauce.

But why not? The justification always lies in Italy’s regional traditions.

Carbonara pasta, despite its controversial origins (an Italian researcher says that Americans created it), perfectly embodies the spirit of this fundamentalism.

It is very traditional in Rome and uses regional Roman ingredients – pecorino (sheep’s) cheese and guanciale, which only recently became known outside of central Italy.

Added to this is the fact that it is a treacherous recipe. Any mistake and the egg and cheese mixture will turn into scrambled eggs. It therefore requires some skill on the part of the stove pilot – this is why Italian jingoism has been taken over by foodie snobbery around the world.

Italians love to tease foreigners who spoil the unique and immutable recipe for pasta ala carbonara: eggs, guanciale, black pepper, pecorino and that’s it.

Now, let’s see what a restaurant in Rome (the intergalactic capital of carbonara) does with the sacred food: it brings the pasta to the table in a shaker, then the waiter shakes the thing as if he were preparing a daiquiri.

Then he dumps the rigatoni (it’s not always spaghetti) onto the customer’s plate, dramatically to be filmed and gain engagement on social media. Like any tacky slot machine in Itaim or Jardim Anália Franco.

The place is called Aroma (Rome, get it?), ostentatiously displays its Michelin star and is located in Palazzo Manfredi, a 5-star hotel overlooking the Colosseum. The dish costs 45 euros (R$ 240).

If the grotesque staging of the “carbonara shakerata” doesn’t put the Roman tradition to shame, a little cream won’t do it.

LINK PRESENT: Did you like this text? Subscribers can access five free accesses from any link per day. Just click the blue F below.