What even is food authenticity? Why we guard carbonara, and flatten chicken rice

I think what is so interesting is also, if you peel back the curtain, most recipes have standardized at a fairly recent point in their national mythos, depending on how long that is.

Recipes are a snapshot of economic and technological advances of the time, and whole classes of recipe are not available until certain technological watersheds, like

* precise temperature controls for ovens and stoves in the early 20th century

* cheap and health(ier) chemical leaveners in the late 19th century

* discovery of consistent vanilla pollination in the 19th century

* exchanges of ingredients in the Columbian exchange (tomatoes in Italy, potatoes in Russia, chilis in India and Korea, etc.)

Also our modern supply chain is very good at magicking away the seasonality and perishability of ingredients, so for example you had early Scottish shortbread primarily using rice flour because it was cheaper at that time.

The older I get, the more I view identity as a sort of trap door. There's no there there that can stand up to sustained scrutiny. Everything has a history, everything is made of something other than what it is.

In the context of food, I laugh at notions of authenticity and tradition - unless the time scale is over 1000 years there's not much interesting to talk about.

I cannot wait for a cultural shift away from respecting "authenticity" and "tradition" in food. It's fine to remember and recognize how things were often done. But the ridiculousness of saying New York style pizza is not pizza or that you have to make things the "right way" needs to go.

Italian restaurant cuisine today is judged by whether it tastes like the way their particular Italian grandma made it.

Asian restaurant cuisine is judged by partly by how different (technique, taste, looks) the dish is from what they can make from home.

Food snobbery is so annoying. But as an Australian I can get behind coffee snobbery. Sorry, we're the best.

Food authenticity should only mean DOP or geographic identity (GI) regulation. Everything else is gatekeeping and power struggle. Im glad this discussion comes up every year with a hard hitting blogger recycling the same points for clicks because at least it makes a new batch of people think about it and the second order implications about identity in general.

If we view carbonara through Asian cooking theory, then the recipe from Il Piccolo Talismano Della Felicita (1964) is probably the best, because the wine and onion adds acidity and sweetness for balance.

Most loud voices get obsessed with a specific definition of a dish and I think for the sake of creativity we should/would shift to using creative names to accommodate preferences.

I believe that us, Americans are pretty good at bending international food to our limited ingredients, our own favorite chemicals, sweeteners (corn syrup in everything), our flour and butter (good luck to make pastries like in Europe, with our poor flour and butter).

So I get it when Italians get offended by our poor rendering of carbonara... and feel that what we get here is off.

"If my grandmother had wheels she would have been a bike" is a bowdlerization of a much older phrase. As my Great-Grandfather, born in 1890 in Widz, Belaruz would say it "ווען די באָבע וואָלט געהאַט בײצִים, װאָלט זי געװען מײַן זײדע" (If my grandmother had balls, she would have been my grandfather.)

Tribalism knows no bounds

While it's true that you won't find published Carbonara recipes pre dating 1952, the Lazio region has had for centuries pasta dishes based on the same ingredients. And they are thoroughly documented.

Both gricia and amatriciana, too other famous pasta dishes from the same region use the same cheese (pecorino) and guanciale. In fact carbonara is nothing more than a gricia with egg yolks.

It just makes no sense to have parmiggiano or french cheese in a recipe coming from a region that did not have these ingredients in the first place and are not part of its culinary history.

And thus the point of authenticity is into rooting where the recipe originated with local ingredients.

Anybody's free to change the recipe all they want, but to call it carbonara when ingredients don't match is misleading the customer expecting a roman dish with roman ingredients.

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