BONUS RECIPE: Double Carbonara

A heretical recipe that unabashedly breaks the rules

Double deliciousness!

The spaghetti alla Carbonara that I grew up with was markedly different from the one I make today. It was my mom’s recipe, and in addition to eggs and cheese it contained pancetta, Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, garlic (!) a splash of dry white wine (!) and parsley (!).

It would probably draw sneers from the current community of carbonara hardliners who maintain that the dish must contain only these five ingredients: guanciale (cured pork jowl), pecorino cheese, egg yolks, black pepper, and pasta (along with some of the starchy cooking water).

But our family all loved it, and it was perfectly in synch with other carbonara recipes of the time (mid- to late 20th century).

To wit: there’s a recipe in my mom’s copy of Ada Boni’s Il Talismano della Felicità (no pub date but I’m guessing it’s a 1950s edition) that calls for whole eggs, pancetta, butter (!), Parmigiano cheese, parsley, pepper, white wine, AND AN ONION. Marcella Hazan (the queen herself) put 4 cloves of garlic, as well as white wine and parsley, in her published version.

Anyway, my conversation with Karima Moyer-Nocchi from Sunday’s newsletter got me to thinking about Carbonara and how, over the years, I’ve pared down my own recipe (based on my mom’s) to be more in line with what is accepted today, and which I like but which also got me to thinking about the recipe for Double Carbonara from my book Big Night In. Like all the recipes in that book, it was developed with generous, family-style entertaining in mind—Carbonara for company, you might say. Here’s what I wrote in the headnote accompanying the recipe: