When Even Simple Histories Get It Wrong
On carbonara, cultural myth-making, and national identity
Let’s start this week on a lighter note, shall we?
(You know me: we’re not going to stay “light” here for long.)
This weekend, I tripped into an episode of 99% Invisible that was actually a cross-post from a cookbook promo series. “Anything’s Pastable” is a four-parter from The Sporkful, and the team at 99% Invisible was replaying Episode 2: Eat Sauté Love.
It’s a pleasant enough foodie outing, which follows a US citizen who invented a pasta shape, the cascatelli, before going to Italy to learn more about pasta in general.
So far so normal, right?
But a key part of Dan Pashman’s journey involved peeling back the notion of “tradition” itself, in part by wrestling with the fact that a famous Italian dish only seems to have entered the cultural record in a meaningful way in the 1950s.
We’re talking, of course, about carbonara, a pasta presentation involving cheese, pork product, raw egg, and pepper. I’m being evasive around the exact ingredients, though, because that’s part of the surprise in this episode: when these recipes first emerged in food guides and local histories in the 1950s, they were not consistent—and one even included chopped clams, instead of pork product at all.
Even more striking for me, though, was this episode’s conversation around collective memory: namely, how fickle it can be, even when tied up in a sense of identity.
(Or perhaps especially when tied up in a sense of identity.)
Although the culinary record suggests that decades were necessary for carbonara to settle into the form most commonly known today, Italians just a decade or so back were in disbelief at this academic revelation, with many insisting that their grandmothers had a recipe that must have gone back generations itself.
Local food scholar Luca Cesari, author of The Discovery of Pasta, suggests that many Italians are just now coming to terms with the cultural myth-making involved here.
But think about the time stamps involved. We’re talking 1949 for the first mention in print, and a host of recipes throughout the 1950s, which used different cheese and meat products, along with vegetables, mushrooms, cream, and even that darned clam.
As the episode explores, one now-dominant theory about the rise of carbonara relates to US soldiers bringing bacon and egg rations that revitalized post-war European kitchens. It’s not that food scholars haven’t found trace elements of the dish in other centuries (e.g., Ippolito Cavalcanti’s 1839 Cucina Teorico-Pratica, which has a pasta recipe involving eggs and cheese). It’s more that something very particular seemed to be happening in the 1950s. A blossoming of recipes in this period speaks not only to cultural fusion, but also something often lost in our discussion of that very concept:
Cultural creation.
The emergence of national identity in moments of stark necessity, and collision.
And what more vital moment of national-myth creation might there be, than when a country freshly demoralized by wartime loss was now tasked with reclaiming whatever “safer” parts of its heritage remained?
Italy was an Axis power in World War II, and a whole generation had grown up under a brutal dictator and fascist indoctrination. After the collapse of that empire—and with it, an ideology expressly predicated on the cultivation of nationalist pride—its people were left in economic ruin. A hard, disorienting road to recovery lay ahead.
But oddly enough, apparently one aspect of Italian fascism, which ran officially from 1922 to 1943, is also what gave Italians what they needed to rebuild after the war.
As one key exchange in the episode reveals:
KATIE PARLA:
The 20th century is when Italians start eating pasta regularly. Some regions still don’t really consume it in a significant way at all.
DAN PASHMAN (FIELD TAPE):
Wait. You’re telling me that pasta wasn’t a big thing in Italy until the 1900s?
KATIE PARLA:
That’s right. People in let’s say Basilicata—the region where my family is from—they might’ve eaten pasta on a holiday, if the Duke or the Noble in that town provided flour. There would be a knowledge that pasta existed. But it wasn’t a daily thing.
DAN PASHMAN (FIELD TAPE):
That’s surprising to me. I mean, that makes it a relatively new thing.
KATIE PARLA:
Pasta as part of an Italian national identity is a 20th century thing.
DAN PASHMAN:
Katie explains that Italy’s separate regions were just unified into one country in the late 1800s. In the early 1900s, the fascists come to power, and they need to figure out how to feed a growing population. They also want to unite the people under one nationalist identity. They decide the solution to both problems is pasta because it’s cheap and easy to make, and it’s already a staple in some parts of the country. So the fascist government builds pasta factories in regions where there were none before, including in Rome.
KATIE PARLA:
There’s a really great archive of fascist propaganda—everything that you can imagine that they’re trying to promote as elements of a new Italian identity. And pasta really figures into that.
I’ve written on nationalism a few times here, and surely will again. It’s such a murky concept—but also a fairly young one, which I think we often forget.
In colonial regions, states usually began as economic ventures, so it’s fair to say that quite a few sites of national pride today started as little more than “[X number of] corporations in a trench-coat” (e.g., Canada, Nigeria)—even if some countries also had cultural stories woven in (e.g., ethnic flights from religious persecution in the US, or a whole colony of cast-off criminals in Australia).
But in “the Old World” proper, the last two centuries of statecraft were also guided by strange myths of cultural purism, the likes of which we’ll revisit later this week.
For our purposes today, though, I just want to encourage us to be a touch unnerved by cultural purism in general. Is it ever innocent, even in something as simple as a meal? Or does it always come to us as part of a broader political package?
After listening to this foodie episode, I sifted through a few food blogs and works of scholarly commentary to confirm or dispute the ideas that Dan Pashman had advanced. One example stood out for its aversion to any change in the national myth.
In 2012, the food and wine historian Jeremy Parzen wrote on his blog, Do Bianchi, with great resistance to the theory of a more recent origin for carbonara. However, to dismiss the post-war creation story for the dish, he had to argue in a remarkably naive way for a Ph.D. of Italian literature (or any literature, really):
Although the designation carbonara doesn’t begin to appear in Italian literature and in English-languages guides to Italian and Roman food until the mid-1950s, I have found an occurrence of the term in the Lunga vita di Trilussa (The Long Life of [the great Roman popular poet] Trilussa), published in Rome in 1951, the year after his death. In this hagiographic account of the poet’s “long life,” the author refers to spaghetti alla carbonara as one of Trilussa’s favorite dishes. It’s unlikely (for all the obvious reasons) that the biographer would include a dish that was introduced by American soldiers who arrived in Rome in 1944.
I also found instances of the term in Alberto Moravia’s wonderful short stories Racconti Romani (Roman Tales), first published in 1954, a delicious collection of vignettes of classic Roman characters, including a waiter (“Il pensatore” or “The Thinker”) who gets into a lot of trouble after insulting a rude guest under his breath. … Again, the fact that the dish is invoked in a portrait of a classic character would seem to indicate that Italians and Romans considered it a typical dish of the Eternal City.
Parzen’s argument here is that these books published in 1951 and 1954 are evidence against a mid-century origin for carbonara—as if Trilussa isn’t allowed to have enjoyed, at the end of his life, a dish that might only have been around for a few years? And as if a story collection about post-war Roman life also wasn’t allowed to celebrate a meal for its characters that might only have been possible in post-war Italy?
This resistance to a more recent origin, though, speaks to a deeper anxiety about who we are without our cultural stories of self—and not just in Italy, but everywhere.
What is a “Canadian”, for example, without poutine, maple syrup, hockey, butter tarts, a deeply entrenched cultural divide between Franco- and Anglo-regions, a fraught political history of abusing the social-welfare legacy of Tommy Douglas, and the ever-present spectre of Indigenous rights and land-claim abuses?
Instead of trying to find some deeper answer to such a nationalist question, though, I’d argue that having more recent origin stories is itself quite empowering. Rather than feeling beholden to vague notions of cultural purity that could easily be undone by a little academic digging, what if we tried to see our societies more fluidly—as ideas that could and should grow with each new generation’s “take” on a classic?
Would we delight any less in being part of a given cultural project, if we were invited to see the whole notion as something we’re supposed to remake for ourselves?
And perhaps more importantly:
Would we be less susceptible to any toxic historical baggage lurking behind notions of having One True Identity—in pasta, as in more overt forms of state and ethnic politics—if we were better prepared to let go of any aspect of the “dish” that does not serve?
Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.
ML
Another example of deliberate mythmaking, only a couple of centuries older, that continues today.
"secrets are not as important to Freemasonry as stories about secrets." -p6
John Dickie (2020). The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World. Public Affairs Books, part of Hachette Books Group. New York, NY.