Carbonara Past and Present

Peter Benchley was in some publisher’s office when he hatched an idea for a book about big bad Great White sharks. Right then and there, Benchley sat down at the publisher’s type writer and spent fifteen minutes writing a pitch for the story that would become Jaws. The feedback he received after submitting the initial pitch was to rewrite it, this time avoiding the combination of gory and funny.

Well, after last night’s entry about a pear crisp that didn’t exist yet, Alyssa suggested that future food writing had a hint of suspense. Tonight not only do I have no food planned for the future (the next four days will unravel without any planning at all), but I’m also ready to shake things up, so I say let’s hack the middleman, forget about time, and go straight to suspenseful writing about food.

Many moons ago I asked O’Milius, a tattooed and grisly cook, how to make Carbonara. Forebodingly, he described my desired meal as one of the simplest and and also most difficult dishes in Italian cooking. The conundrum immediately trapped me as it flashed back to my poached egg days. We should call being a sucker to this paradox “Poached Egg Syndrome.”

Carbonara required the rendering of some pancetta before tossing it with some pasta, raw eggs, cheese and pepper. I’m sure there were a few other ingredients too, but I can’t be certain. I rendered. And I rendered. And kept on rendering for over two hours. At the time I believed that rendering meant cooking off every bit of fat from the meat. Since I only had dull cheap knives at the time, I’d diced the pancetta into very big pieces. There were huge pieces of fat to render, and they weren’t going away. Compounding the problem was my belief that the heat must be kept low, as I was warned that too much heat would scramble the eggs once we got to toss phase. Many hours later, I had a pan full of pancetta that I’d pulverized in an attempt to smash the fat into submission, and when I tossed it with the eggs and served it up to my roommate, he took one bite, went to the fridge, grabbed a jar of sauce, and said, “it tastes pretty good when you add red sauce.”

Annotations – isn’t this just like a horror movie! Every spectator can tell that whatever happens, it’s going to suck! And then, to top it off, RED sauce! Symbolism! Sweet sweet symbolism! Red sauce equals blood.

AND THEN…well, I’ll be damned if there isn’t a Carbonara recipe on the internet. There is. It says pretty much the same thing as O’Milius said, with a few key differences. I know what rendering is now, I have a huge ass motherfucking cleaver at my disposal, my knife skills are erratic but also vicious, and I will not stand for too large of a dice anymore. No dice large because I’m in charge, I always say. It also lists the time it should take before the pancetta “begins to render.” One to two minutes. That whole time all those moons ago I could have avoided the disaster of horrible pasta by spending two minutes rendering instead of two hours! Bastards!

Right and it says to add onions, which is always fun. And also whole eggs instead of just yolks, as O’Milius had prescribed. And all this other stuff that happens when you follow a recipe from the internet and words instead of some off the cuff cook and your memory of his porous instructions. So what I’m saying is there it was right in front of me, the scroll that would solve my problems and given me the carbonara I had desired since I was a boy yodeling in the woodlands of Marin.

So what happened? Was the carbonara cooked off the recipe good? Was it great? Is this a mystery? There is suspense in mystery.

Mysteries need solutions that are not the answer to the question, “was it good.” Or even, “was it great.” And also we need red sauce = blood in this. And without truly terrible carbonara, there is no red sauce, no blood, no suspense, but there is a new conundrum...