'Stop this madness': NYT angers Italians with 'smoky tomato carbonara' recipe
Recipe using bacon and parmesan cheese attracts ire of chefs, foodies and farmers’ association
www.theguardian.com
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'Stop this madness': NYT angers Italians with 'smoky tomato carbonara' recipe - Guardian
- Thread starter Sqrt
- Start date
www.theguardian.com
I hope this doesn't come across as ignorant (and maybe it is, idk) but I hate gatekeeping like this in the food world. Especially when it seems the NYT author even said this wasn't meant to be particularly authentic pasta
Then again I recognize that there is a fuckton of gross appropriation/general insensitiveness to cultural staple dishes and maybe this qualifies?
Then again I recognize that there is a fuckton of gross appropriation/general insensitiveness to cultural staple dishes and maybe this qualifies?
I don't see the problem. It wasn't billed as the most authentic carbonara ever. Fiddling with recipes is one of the great things about cooking.
I mean it's not like art is being stolen or practices are being sold and marketed to an audience who doesn't understand them, they just put some bacon and tomato into a dish. It's just food.
I added vinegar to my tonkotsu ramen when living in Japan, and my Japanese friends made fun of me until they tried it and found it to be delicious. Not like it's unheard of, either, considering google results for "酢 ラーメン" (vinegar ramen)
Why do people care how others prepare their food so much? Same thing with people that unironically get heated over pineapple on pizza; there are people who don't just joke about it, because I had a boss refuse to get it for the office because he thought it was disgusting despite more than half the employees wanting it. Some other coworkers were against it, despite people wanting it. Let people eat what they want if it's not harming anyone.
Why do people care how others prepare their food so much? Same thing with people that unironically get heated over pineapple on pizza; there are people who don't just joke about it, because I had a boss refuse to get it for the office because he thought it was disgusting despite more than half the employees wanting it. Some other coworkers were against it, despite people wanting it. Let people eat what they want if it's not harming anyone.
While this is totally true, I feel like it's a separate issue.
I guess I don't understand how food can be culturally appropriated. I understand that's kind of a loaded term but I fully believe it exists, I just don't know how it can count when new dishes are made by trying different things.
What does define a "carbonara" then? Is it just "you take eggs and mixed them with the pasta at the end"?
User Banned (4 Months): Concern Trolling Around Appropriation and Inflammatory Derail Attempt; Long History and Numerous Prior Bans for Inflammatory Behavior
Funny to see the reactions to this vs. "white chef does something different to an Asian dish" type-threads.
What's the controversy? It said up front that it wasn't a traditional dish and that they went with easy to find ingredients so that people could actually make it themselves. How many people can get pecorino or guanciale at their grocery store?
I feel like Italians should have a bigger issue with places like The Olive Garden than some random recipe in the NYTs if this was the case.
New York Italian gatekeeping is two of the most obnoxious types of gatekeeping (New Yorker gatekeeping and Italian gatekeeping) married into one big pile of gabagool.
Man, people who gets offended when things aren't made by the book weird me out. There are infinite combinations for making a dish, location specific variations, adaptations due to lack of ingredient disponibility or simply a thing of personal taste. It's fine, it's all fine.
I think it depends on how it's framed. If it's something like this case, where the chef is just presenting it as a fun twist on a classic dish, that's fine.
But there are also articles and videos of white chefs purporting to have the definitive version of a traditional dish (asian or latin american, for example ), and it's easy to see how the members of those cultures would take offense.
It's pretty common to add vinegar to Chinese noodles, wonton mien for example, with red vinegar is standard.
This doesn't seem like that big of an outrage. National food groups like Coldiretti are paid to enforce as conservative a view on food as possible, and randos on social media getting mad at bacon in carbonara are extremely easy to ignore as nobody is going to pay $25~$40/lb for guanciale for a weekend family dinner.
I think people take offense when you name it the same as food that has very specific ingredients or ways of being made. Like "tomato carbonara"? What? Why not just call it pasta which is the catchall term?
For Italians and the French, cuisine is regional identity. It's not strange and calling it such is awful.
From the 5th generation Michael Anthony Proscuitto jackoffs in Staten Island upset by this? It's not just strange, it's fucking embarrassing.
I mean I might make shitty carbonara but at least I don't burgle houses. 🤷
Per my wife, who is both Italian, and learned how to cook from her father in a long line of cooks in the family: Food is meant to be experimented on. Some of the best chefs of our time started their career by reinventing classic dishes and putting their own spin on them. It doesn't make the classic dish invalid or disappear. It just makes something new. Sometimes the new thing works and sometimes it doesn't. That is what makes cooking exciting.
If the recipe acknowledges the ways it's differing from the original and where the substitutions are being made I'm not sure there's even really an appropriation issue? They're pretty straight up that this is using more easily sourced American substitutions, and adding tomatoes because we know y'all Americans like tomatoes. At least this seems seems like a reasonably tasty dish, unlike previous NYT classics like why don't you make your guacamole just a little bit worse with some peas, or the bizarre Sino-Mexican fusion of ma po tofu nachos.
Because it's still otherwise using the same preparation method as a carbonara, just with tomato paste and cherry tomatoes added to it.
I thought that was something recent. But I looked it up and it turns out it was 23 years ago and he did 2 years in prison.
The guy he burgled isn't holding a grudge: https://www.standard.co.uk/showbiz/...my-home-paul-young-tells-tv-chef-6371984.html
it's very common, it's even like... sitting on the bar at a lot of ramen shops in Japan? lots of tare, the fundamental flavoring element of a ramen dish (Japanese stocks are not seasoned), contains vinegar of some sort too...
Yeah. If someone tried to pass off tacos as "open faced minced beef wraps with zesty tomato sauce" I'd pop a blood vessel instantly.
That's not what's happening here but there has been a thread about it before with a different dish. People were very dismissive then.
Let's be real here, Italians have been appropriating dishes far before Americans have.
Hell most Italian foods actually use that naming scheme. They took something traditional, and added extra ingredients.
For example, my family never made traditional pizzelles most of the time. We made Pizzelles con ciacollato. (chocolate pizzelle).
This really isn't an issue, and I say this as a 2nd Gen Italian.
Well that's the thing. It isn't called a carbonara, it's called "tomato carbonara" so yes. It's distinct, and it is not trying to be a traditional dish.
Hell most Italian foods actually use that naming scheme. They took something traditional, and added extra ingredients.
For example, my family never made traditional pizzelles most of the time. We made Pizzelles con ciacollato. (chocolate pizzelle).
This really isn't an issue, and I say this as a 2nd Gen Italian.
To be fair I've had fish and chips where the chips were french fries instead of the thicker cut variety. That's not fish and chips. I just know to avoid that place now, no need for outrage, just disappointment.
Same problem here, a carbonara doesn't have tomato. I don't think many people are genuinely outraged, just the usual social media amplification.
That's why the NYT literally called it tomato carbonara.
The "it's not carbonara because it has tomato" argument is like claiming that "buttered bread" is an inappropriate way to refer to bread with butter on it, on the grounds that the word "bread" doesn't imply the presence of butter.
This is the definition of faux outrage. Chefs are constantly changing ingredients to recipes to create something new. Anyone upset that the NYT made a smoky tomato carbonara needs to take a deep breath.
I can't even believe these quotes are real:
It's not called carbonara! The NYT did exactly what he wanted them to do by calling it something else.
If this takes root in international cooking and removes the original carbonara from restaurants, it's because people like it more. That obviously isn't going to happen, but there's nothing wrong with tastes changing.
Of course I don't use pine nuts when I make pesto; they're really expensive! My Italian grandma would be proud that I'm keeping her recipes alive and making them my own instead of worrying about some made up betrayal.
I can't even believe these quotes are real:
It's not called carbonara! The NYT did exactly what he wanted them to do by calling it something else.
If this takes root in international cooking and removes the original carbonara from restaurants, it's because people like it more. That obviously isn't going to happen, but there's nothing wrong with tastes changing.
Of course I don't use pine nuts when I make pesto; they're really expensive! My Italian grandma would be proud that I'm keeping her recipes alive and making them my own instead of worrying about some made up betrayal.
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Some people need to get a life instead of complaining about a recipe. The author never claimed it was 'authentic' to begin with.
This is what I'm leaning towards. I don't even know what those two ingredients are and I can easily get bacon and parmesan.
I get that and it's why nobody should be offended, I was more defending people who gently disapprove of it I guess. They make it clear it's tomato and that's fine, there's no controversy here.
Just don't call it what it isn't, do the research.
I'm from Spain, we had a fascist dictatorship. A part of that is the fascists pushed ultra patriotism on everyone. So after four decades of that, many didn't identify with the anthem or the flag anymore, we were divided by those symbols. What made us all Spanish was the culture, and that includes food culture, like Spanish omelette or tapas. To us, it's as important as the flag is for Americans, and I've seen how fucking insane many Americans go if you disrespect what to most is just a piece of cloth.
When fucking Jaimie Oliver makes arroz con cosas, a spanish dish, and calls it paella, a different Spanish dish, because he couldn't be bothered to do a little bit of fucking research, yet profits off of our culture, which means is getting the attention a spanish chef is not, it offends us. When others who don't belong to our culture try to "evolve it" we say, it's not yours to evolve. Take what you learn from our food and make something your own and name it whatever you want, say you were inspired by what inspired you, but don't come telling us how you improved or reinvented our culture because you can't affect a culture you don't belong to. Think of how offensive it would be to do that to the flag, traditional costume, ritual, stories, you name it, of a different culture. Why is food different? It's only seen as different by those from cultures where food is not related to identity.