King Carbonara

Long a perpetrator of bad carbonara, last night I finally realized my recent carbonara epiphany and made CARBONARA AS GOD INTENDED.

In these lean times, Ms Vidal and I have learned to make do on the barest of staples. As vegetables cost more than pork here in DC, even during the winter months when said vegetables are little other than limp, pale fibers cleverly assembled into the simulacra of vegetables, bacon makes up a crucial part of our daily life.

Luckily for us, the geniuses over at Union Meat Company at Eastern Market sell thick-cut skin-on bacon for $3.50 / lb. Compare this to the packed detritus selling at our local chino for $4.99 / lb and stand in awe at the altar of usury.

Union Meat's bacon is so thick it comes off the skillet like fried ham, with a crisp run of pork rind along the edge. Not exactly lean, it still packs enough meat on the slice to amount to more than just the ashen grease you get from most bacon.

Times being lean, I pour off all bacon fat into a mug I keep in the fridge. Nevermind the trouble of filtering the stuff. If you're subsisting on bacon, grit (and cancer) are the least of your worries.

After months of sadly gnawing the ersatz produce foisted on we the peasantry by the agents of simulacra, I've come to regard Union Meat's bacon as fruit of the pig. It sits side by side with Ken's Kash's bacon in heaven.

Carbonara has long floated about the periphery of my scant, bastard knowledge of Italian food. While never a workhorse in my stable, I always admired the application of a raw egg to recently cooked noodles, as that simple gesture struck me as a ray of unrepentant peasant sunshine shining through the codified and twice-inspected tedium of bullshit that reigns over the earth. But I never grasped the idea of the dish, I never got carbonara until earlier this week, when I was once again making it badly and had what I can only describe as a vision.

Previously, I had always thought of the dish as essentially fettucini alfredo with a raw egg tossed in for sport. I very rarely make the stuff, as alfredo sauce always reminds me of a story I once heard about a girl who got herpes on her face after eating fettucine alfredo at Olive Garden. Besides, white sauces always struck me as as the kind of Italian food mediocre French chefs serve to tourists in the Piémont. But the crucial error, the central carbonara error, lies not in the relative whiteness of the sauce, but in thinking of it as a sauce at all.

Apart from the cool trick of throwing a raw egg into everyone's dinner, carbonara always appealed to me because of its curious name. Because I am stupid and rush to judgment and always think I'm right and know positively jack shit about Italian, I long assumed carbonara referred to gli carabinieri who fought in World War One, as in pasta agli carabonieri, or some such pidgin nonsense. I'm sure attributing carbonara to desperately inventive soldiers scavenging in the ruins of North Italy is the fault of reading too much Hemingway.

Turns out the origin of the term is a mystery. The root of the term, "carbon", means exactly that -- carbon, as in carbon scoring, as in charcoal, as in coal. Is it coal miner's pasta, hearty enough to propel an Italian laborer through a grueling day's work in the tunnels? Does carbon refer to the copious amounts of black pepper flecked like bits of coal, or char, throughout the dish? Judgment is still out, but one thing for certain is that carbon does not a carabin be.

According to wikipedia, however, the dish did not become widely popular until after WW2, when the Italian citizenry subsisted on rations handed out by occupying American forces. In those rations? Bacon and eggs.

The fundamental principal at the heart of Lo Paisan philosophy is that good food is always a product of inspired improvisation using ingredients at hand. While you will never see Ms Vidal or me turning up our noses at ossetra caviar and chilled champagne, the fact remains that, even for the wealthy, cooking is nearly always done with ingredients at hand.

We the peasantry, who live in a post-industrial culinary wasteland where one in three Americans contracts diabetes from the corn syrup and gristle slopped in our troughs by global conglomerates, will seldom if ever have access to luxury ingredients. But we can take solace in the thought that all peasantry, throughout history, have been presented with the same dilemma -- making food with what there is. This dilemma, a daily issue for most of the people who ever lived, is the catalyst for inspiration and innovation. Who would have thought at the time that Grandma Samangiare's improvised paste of mashed basil leaves, olive oil, pine nuts and garlic would turn out the way it did?

For the post-war Italians, American rations could have been a bone in the throat, an aberration against the purity of Italian culinary heritage, against its native nobility, but faced with hungry children and whining husbands Grandma Samangiare took to Uncle Sam's bacon and eggs with the same gusto she showed corn, the tomato, and the noodle before that.

In the course of our lifelong quest to live up to Grandma Samangiare's example, Ms Vidal and I have learned that there is no room for purity or native nobility in the hungry life of Lo Paisan. That is the second principal of Lo Paisan philosophy: in the beginning, there was hunger, the ingredients at hand and inspired improvisation; there are no ur-recipes.

So, CARBONARA AS GOD INTENDED is, essentially, bacon and eggs thrown on top of pasta. The central carbonara error is to view the bacon and eggs as ingredients in a sauce. Instead, think of carbonara as breakfast served with noodles in the place of bread or potatoes.

The raw egg tossed into the freshly drained, still steaming noodles is not an empty gesture. Stirred quickly into the naked noodles, the egg quickly develops into the delicate and delicious curds of slowly scrambled eggs.

The bacon, cooked apart, cut up into bits, and put into the noodles still hot and glazed with melted fat, stays crisp this way, as it should. When it is fried and then braised in an uninspired white sauce the finest bacon develops a chewy cat-gut sinuousness that takes all the bacon out of bacon.

Of course, Italians having their proclivities, fresh herbs and hard cheeses might be added, but not because Grandma Samangiare read about it in Gourmet Magazine, but because a hard wedge of pecorino tucked under the saddle blanket was to a post-war Italian peasant in the hills outside of Rome what a tube of Scrapple was to his contemporaneous Baltimorean brother-peasant, ie: ingredients at hand.

This carbonara epiphany led to one of the finest Italianate meals I've ever cooked; surpassed, if at all, only by MS VIDAL'S BIRTHDAY LASAGNA and AUGUST PESTO.

To whit:

CARBONARA AS GOD INTENDED

Make fresh pasta.*

I like to make a quadruple batch, as the kneeding is the hardest part, and kneeding is just as easy with a quadruple dose as a single. For CARBONARA AS GOD INTENDED I lifted a move from Batali I saw on Iron Chef America and sifted unsweetened cocoa into the flour. Batali says it was common during the Renaissance. A note on flour: I use regular all purpose flour, and I bet you 2000 lira that if Grandma Samangiare lived in DC today she would too. Cut the pasta into tagliatelle about 1/4 in wide. I use an old Amish rolling pin cum pasta cutter. Set water onto boil.

In a mortar and pestle combine herbs (I used a tablespoon of dried garden thyme and the leaves from one six inch stalk of fresh rosemary), a teaspoon of black pepper, five cloves of garlic, a dash of salt and olive oil. Mash into a pesto.

Fry up half a pound of thick-sliced bacon in a skillet. I used Union Meat Company's ridiculously good thick-sliced skin-on bacon. Set aside. Pour off most of the hot grease into a coffee mug and save for later. Add one chopped onion to hot skillet and stir, adding olive oil. Moderate the heat so that you kill the onions but do not blacken them. When the onions are very soft, stir in the pesto and remove from heat.

Add fresh pasta to boiling water. Fresh pasta cooks very quickly. Do not overcook it.

Add a few spoonfuls of pasta water to the onions/pesto in the skillet.

Add a dash of milk to onion/pesto mixture.

When the pasta is done, drain quickly and return to pot. Crack one egg into the noodles and stir quickly, but gently, until the egg forms solid curds.

Add onion/pesto mixture.

Cut the bacon into small pieces into the noodles. I used a pair of scissors.

Stir and serve in a large bowl.

In the event that you have a hard, sharp Italian cheese such as pecarino or parmesan by all means incorporate this into the dish. If, like Ms Vidal and I, you can't afford to pay 16$ a pound for anything, least of all cheese, do as the Italian peasants of yore did and sprinkle the carbonara with crumbs from stale white bread.

In the event you have a bottle of red wine around, but all means drink it with CARBONARA AS GOD INTENDED. If you do not, water is a delicious accompaniment.

*It is imperative to use fresh pasta with carbonara, as the interplay of textures between the crisp bacon and pillow-soft noodle is one of the dish's foremost qualities.

Carbonara as God Intended

Make fresh pasta.*
I like to make a quadruple batch, as the kneeding is the hardest part, and kneeding is just as easy with a quadruple dose as a single.
For CARBONARA AS GOD INTENDED I lifted a move from Batali I saw on Iron Chef America: Battle Chocolate and Coconut and sifted unsweetened cocoa into the flour.
A note on flour: I use regular all purpose flour, and I bet you 2000 lira that if Grandma Samangiare lived in DC today she would too.
Cut the pasta into tagliatelle about 1/4 in wide. I use an old Amish rolling pin cum pasta cutter.
Set water onto boil.

In a mortar and pestle combine herbs (I used a tablespoon of dried garden thyme and the leaves from one six inch stalk of fresh rosemary), a teaspoon of black pepper, five cloves of garlic, a dash of salt and olive oil. Mash into a pesto.

Fry up half a pound of thick-sliced bacon in a skillet. I used Union Meat Company's ridiculously good thick-sliced skin-on bacon. Set aside. Pour off most of the hot grease into a coffee mug and save for later.
Add one chopped onion to hot skillet and stir, adding olive oil.
Moderate the heat so the onions cook until very soft but do not blacken.
When the onions are very soft, stir in the pesto and remove from heat.

Add fresh pasta to boiling water.
Fresh pasta cooks very quickly. Do not overcook it.
Add a few spoonfuls of pasta water to the onions/pesto in the skillet.
Add a dash of milk to onion/pesto mixture.

When the pasta is done, drain quickly and return to pot.
Crack one egg into the noodles and stir quickly, but gently, until the egg forms solid curds.
Add onion/pesto mixture.
Cut the bacon into small pieces into the noodles. I used a pair of scissors.
Stir and serve in a large bowl.

In the event that you have a hard, sharp Italian cheese such as pecarino or parmesan by all means incorporate this into the dish. If, like Ms Vidal and I, you can't afford to pay 16$ a pound for anything, least of all cheese, do as the Italian peasants of yore did and sprinkle the carbonara with crumbs from stale white bread.

In the event you have a bottle of red wine around, but all means drink it with CARBONARA AS GOD INTENDED. If you do not, water is a delicious accompaniment.

*It is imperative to use fresh pasta with carbonara, as the interplay of textures between the crisp bacon and pillow-soft noodle is one of the dish's foremost qualities.