New York Times cooking up a storm

You would think The New York Times knows exactly what it’s doing. Though they placed a controversial topic to broach on social media.

“Tomatoes are not traditional in carbonara, but they lend a bright tang to the dish,”

read the tweet, linking to a recipe for a

“smoky tomato carbonara”.

1.8 million views later, a cooking debate as old as time had been reignited.

Spaghetti alla carbonara

When thinking or speaking about carbonara, we think of an Italian pasta dish from Rome, typically made with spaghetti, that blends diced pork, eggs, cheese, and black pepper. It was in the middle of the 20th century the dish got its name.

U.S. military personnel brought with them abundant stocks of powdered eggs and dehydrated bacon, goods that served as a currency of goodwill — and sometimes actual currency — in a starving nation. Combined with pasta, these ingredients became pasta carbonara (‘charcoal burner‘), the name suggesting food that one might feed a hungry coal miner or Carbonari (‘charcoalmen’) in need of ample sustenance before heading into the pit.

These days, so many people try to bring a lot of variations with food ingredients.

The recipe, by food writer Kay Chun was first published in 2021, when it attracted such anger that the Italian farmers’ association, Coldiretti, actually released a statement on the matter, describing smoky tomato carbonara as the “tip of the iceberg” in the “falsification” of traditional Italian dishes.

Pasta carbonara, they said, was one of the most “betrayed” recipes in Italian cooking.

“The real risk is that a fake ‘made in Italy’ dish takes root in international cooking, removing the authentic dish from the market space, and trivialising our local specialities which originate from unique techniques and territories.”

Photo by Sam Lion on Pexels.com

It might sound dramatic, but they’re not wrong – since its invention in 19th century Lazio, carbonara must be among the most adapted, twisted, bastardised (depending on your point of view) recipes of all time.

Read more about it: ‘This should be illegal’: Why your carbonara could get you cancelled – When it suggested readers add tomato to the classic dish, the New York Times was cooking up a storm – but it’s no laughing matter

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