Carbonara

• 2 egg yolks
• 50g parmesan or pecorino (plus extra for finishing)
• Black pepper
• Salt
• Guanciale (or pancetta or bacon, based on what’s available)
• 75g spaghetti

Boil approx 1.5 litres of water, heavily salted (use less salt if you’re using pecorino – it’s very salty already). Cut your pork product into lardons. Add the spaghetti to your salted water, and begin to fry the meat over medium-low heat, starting in a cold pan – use a bit of oil if the meat isn’t very fatty, but if you start from a cold pan and fry at a relatively low temperature, there should be plenty of fat which renders out.

Mix the cheese with your egg yolks and add a generous amount of black pepper – more than you think. After a few minutes, add some of the water from your spaghetti pot to the cheese mixture, a few tablespoons at a time. Mix this well before adding more until the mixture becomes relatively loose. The starch in the pasta water should help the mixture to bind, but don’t worry if it separates a bit.

Once your pasta is nearly done, transfer it – directly, if possible, but draining if necessary – to the pan with the pork product (being careful not to start a grease fire). Give this a cursory mix to combine, over a very low flame. Add your egg mixture and mix vigorously, tossing everything to make sure it’s all well-combined. Add pasta water as necessary to get the sauce to the desired consistency. It thickens up quite substantially once it’s sat on your plate for a while, so aim for a fairly runny sauce to begin with.

Finally, plate up, and sprinkle with a generous dusting of pamesan or pecorino and a few more twists of black pepper. It’s generally appropriate to take a moment at this point to marvel at God’s creation. If you don’t do it now, you’ll certainly want to after you’ve had your first bite, so you might as well get it out of the way so you can enjoy your meal uninterrupted. Bon appétit.

But that’s not it. That’s a recipe, but this isn’t a recipe blog. You see, I have thoughts about carbonara. Not just feelings – though there are plenty of those, too – but thoughts. Scroll further at your peril, because the remainder of this post will be a deeply self-indulgent look at my relationship with carbonara.

Sometimes, something impacts you in a way which you can’t quite predict. Often, that thing will be a piece of media: a book, a film, a song, or a Vine. In my case, it was a dish. This dish. Carbonara. It’s taken on meaning for me that goes far beyond the dish itself. Even just describing it as “food”, though entirely accurate, seems inadequate somehow. It’s not just food: food implies a certain utilitarianism, mustering images of cavemen seeking protein for sustenance, not of carbonara. The consumption of carbonara is less like the carnal, messy experience of eating wings (though that’s great too), and more like the reflective, spiritual experience of communion. That bread is Jesus’ body, broken for you, but carbonara is his legacy.

We ought to go back to the beginning, to where the obsession began. The year was 2017. Or perhaps early- to mid-2018. My memory is a bit hazy, but at the time the experience wasn’t spiritual; its significance only emerged much later. At the time, it was simply lunch.

I was in my (now-ex-) girlfriend’s student digs in Bristol, and she started making carbonara. She was using bacon lardons from a packet (fair enough), unsalted water (criminal), pre-grated parmesan (reprehensible but admittedly efficient), and milk (baffling). Knowing what I know now, I couldn’t, in good conscience, describe the dish she produced as “carbonara”. It was carbonara in the same way that [good metaphor]: it may have looked like carbonara, but it was something else entirely. Nonetheless, I must pay tribute to this experience, because it was formative.

On one ill-fated occasion, I attempted to recreate this dish for my parents. I followed her recipe to a T, or so I thought, but something went awry, and I served my parents spaghetti with scrambled eggs and milk sauce. My dad, ever the diplomat, made a valiant attempt to hide his disgust. My mum either made no such effort, or was simply a great deal less successful.

Thankfully, though perhaps against my better judgement, this was not the end of my carbonara journey. It was merely the slightly ropey first episode after an inexplicably successful pilot. I quickly realised that further research was needed, and that my beau’s method would only take me so far – indeed, it had taken me as far as it could. In a series of installments which would have made an excellent anime montage (but which actually took place over a rather protracted period), I embarked on a journey to perfect my carbonara. Naturally, I started with a method which involved the use of cream – not my finest hour, but better than milk, and an all-too-common error for rookie carbonara chefs (carbonistas?) this far from Rome.

Over time, my methods improved. The act of making carbonara gradually became less of an act, and more of a ritual. I stopped using cream (thank goodness), and as I did more research, I came closer and closer to the grail – a truly traditional carbonara. I experimented with various elements: the technique itself, the amount and type(s) of cheese, the pork product, and perhaps most importantly, the yolk-to-white ratio. The true grail has thus far eluded me, because it’s extraordinarily difficult to source guanciale in rural Scotland or Hampshire. I’ve now had a Waiting for Godot-level wild goose chase with two separate Italian delis, 400 miles apart, both of whom offered repeated reassurances that guanciale had been omitted from their most recent delivery, but would assuredly be in the next one. I’ve not given up, not entirely, but this element of the project is on the backburner.

Throughout these escapades, I’ve learned a range of important lessons. Of course, there’s the usual tripe about persistence, dedication to the craft, etc. but such lessons are repeated ad nauseum by anyone with an audience and, frankly, I’m bored of them. Far more interesting and important to me are the lessons about carbonara itself.

Firstly, this dish is utterly confounding in its allure. It defies reason that such a simple meal could have such an effect (though if anyone could be relied upon to produce this meal, it’s the Italians). Despite being, according to my friends, an extremely difficult dish to eat with any elegance, it’s also profoundly romantic. It’s rich without being sick, satisfying without being stodgy. Its aphrodisiac qualities are quite astonishing – and they’re doubled if the object of one’s affections observes its creation, rather than simply consuming the end result. Among my circle of friends, carbonara has taken on a life of its own, and has acquired a sort of mythos. Four syllables, but they mean so much more.

Second, egg is important. The type of egg, the number of eggs, and perhaps most importantly, the ratio of egg yolk to egg white. My recipe above includes two egg yolks, and no whites. This is based on a lot of experimentation: my understanding is that this is the most traditional method, but I’ve also tested all sorts of other ratios. The differences are tangible, and this is what I enjoy most at the moment – though sometimes I’ll use just one yolk, and occasionally I’ll use as many as four, for a very rich and indulgent carbonara with a thicker sauce.

Some methods – including that advocated by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, perhaps the best chef on YouTube – involve using one full egg (and often an extra yoke), but I find that this leads to an overly saucy end result. The white doesn’t add much except extra volume and liquidity to the sauce, but you can achieve this with pasta water, which is also much more flexible because it thickens more readily when everything’s coming together at the end – if you find you’ve added too much pasta water, you can just toss it vigorously over heat so that the sauce tightens up, and if you take it too far, you can just add more until eventually you’ve got the right balance.

Finally, the details really matter. The simplicity of carbonara means that every ingredient has to stand on its own for the dish as a whole to be truly impressive – there can be no cutting corners. It may seem extra, but it’s really worth grinding the pepper fresh and grating the parmesan rather than buying a bag of pre-grated. Perhaps the biggest difference, though, is with the pasta itself. I’m not the sort of prescriptivist who’ll tell you that you shouldn’t use bucatini or linguine if that’s your preference – I’ve even seen some appetising renditions made with rigatoni and orichiette. But you should buy the highest-quality pasta you can justify. Higher-quality pasta tends to have a much rougher surface, which leads to starchier pasta water (helpful for building the emulsion) and helps the sauce adhere to the pasta much more effectively, which makes a genuinely big difference.

When people learn about this obsession of mine, there’s typically one question on their lips: why do I like carbonara so much? Not only have I read and watched a huge range of carbonara-related content, but there have been times when I’ve had carbonara five or six times over the course of a week. I can’t really blame people for wondering what it is about this dish that’s captivated me so thoroughly, and indeed I’ve given it a lot of thought myself.

Of course, primarily, the dish is simply delicious. It takes a while for me to get bored of things I enjoy – I’m very much a songs-on-repeat sorta guy – so the fact that I enjoy carbonara means I can eat it a lot. But that’s only part of the story.

Carbonara-making is something of an art form. A lot of cooking is just about putting things together, but there’s a level of artisanship with carbonara. Part of this is down to its simplicity – as I said before, the details really matter here – but it’s also down to the way in which the dish comes together. Everything has a sequence. The process is astonishingly quick, around fifteen minutes from start to finish, and it’s all active time. With most dishes, there’s at least a little bit of downtime, but carbonara is a whirlwind of activity, and I think there’s a certain degree of beauty in that – the physicality of constant movement, and the slight tension of knowing that the timings are really quite precise.

It’s also an extremely convenient meal. It’s entirely satisfying, I always have the ingredients on-hand, and it comes together in fifteen minutes – it takes no longer to make a carbonara than to cook a frozen pizza. It’s very easy to make a one-person portion, so I don’t have to worry about saving leftovers or separating things into awkward quantities. It doesn’t use too many dishes, and it all takes place on the stove, so there’s no pre-heating involved.

Perhaps most important to me, though, is the sense of ritual. I value rituals, and sometimes I’ll do something in a slightly old-fashioned or difficult way because it feels more “proper” to me – shaving is a good example of this. Making carbonara has become one of my rituals. Though I might vary the proportions or techniques slightly, the core method remains the same, and it’s very “everything in its place”, so to speak. There’s something very comforting about knowing exactly how it’s going to feel, and how the dish is going to come out, having gone through the ritual so many times.

Maybe it’s a bit silly to develop such an obsession over a meal. After all, it’s just food – but I don’t think it’s fair to essentialise things in that way. Things can take on a significance far greater than their essence. Although carbonara is just food, it’s also much more than food. It’s a ritual, it’s comfort, and above all, it’s delicious. Before you eat it, it’s simply bon appétit, but before you make it, it’s bon voyage.