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I like reading about origin of recipes and how they came to be and the continuously evolving nature.  

Recently watched a Japanese variety show on using shelf stable bags of pasta sauce  loved by many in Japan.  They took five different varieties to Italy using their pasta and asked them to rate them in five different regions of Italy from north to south.  

One pasta sauce was dinged the most and it was carbonara.  People in Italy complained that guanciale was not used and instead pancetta or thick bacon was used. Without guanciale it is not carbonara and I have heard this for years.  But.....

But recently I find that first recipe for carbonara  was published in 1952 in the US.  That this was actually created for American servicemen stationed in Italy after the WWII by Italians to use great American guality  bacon, powdered eggs brought by Americans and pasta and the Americans stationed there used to call it breakfast spaghetti due to bacon and eggs.  There are lots of sites talking about this for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonara

https://www.bbc.com/trav...-pasta-causing-a-dispute

I am not surprised at all since beloved spam transformed some Okinawan recipes ie spam chanpuru, spam miso soup, spam musubi.  Not only spam, but their taco rice because many US servicemen loved tacos. 

in Japan, hamburg (mixture of ground beef and pork) etc introduced by American military presence. There is also their version of what they call hash beef over rice.  People in Japan rarely ate beef in those times.  

I'm really surprised it would be the meat that people would pick out to dislike from packet carbonara sauce because surely the whole point of carbonara is you don't actually make a sauce, you just stir the dressing ingredients into the hot pasta with a bit of the pasta water, and you don't get a sauce as such. 

I find the whole origins thing a bit annoying.  I first, maybe 40 years or more ago, had recipes that used pancetta with little stories about how it might originally have been made using American service rations, which definitely would not have contained guanciale but only bacon, quite possibly even tinned bacon.  Then, but only in the last 20 years. I keep hearing that it's a dish from Lazio and that it's only correctly made with guanciale. That's certainly something that would be available in Lazio, but my suspicion is that the restaurant that all  the TV programmes visit has kind of hijacked the story.

I can buy little packets of petale di guanciale for making carbonara, and they do make very nice dish., but to be honest it's a good quick dinner made with pancetta or even good English bacon so I am inclined to just treat carbonara as a method a bit like i treat quiche as a method rather than a fixed recipe unless I'm actually making a named quiche Lorraine, and just avoid the packet sauce 

Originally Posted by: StokeySue

I'm really surprised it would be the meat that people would pick out to dislike from packet carbonara sauce because surely the whole point of carbonara is you don't actually make a sauce, you just stir the dressing ingredients into the hot pasta with a bit of the pasta water, and you don't get a sauce as such.

Sorry but as someone with Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome (sometimes called Meares-Irlen Sydrome) I can't read that.

ThePatheticBaker - I have removed the formatting on the post - unfortunately when someone is using our accessibility tool then their posts on the Forum appears in the formatting they have selected. But I will always remove it as soon as I spot it.

Originally Posted by: Jane

… our accessibility tool posts …

That's the dilemma what is "accessible" to one may not be to others. But thanks for making the text visible.