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MORE THAN JUST A CARBONARAAngelika Mazzoli Taic

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MORE THAN JUST A CARBONARAAngelika Mazzoli Taic

Cultural products are part of cultures that are indeed in a relentless state of becoming, ceaselessly encountering, altering and been altered by other cultures.

In the attempt of studying of the origins, meaning and perception of a particular culinary and cultural product such as the very simple pasta alla carbonara, a discussion emerges about the identity, rituals and change.

The starting point is the (not only) Italian obsession of finding the authentic version of the history of the origins and the ‘one’ recipe. An obsession that discloses question about who we are and where are we going.

The ritual of the everyday, performed through the making of a dish, preserves and discloses the meaning and value of an identity. An identity that is lived and remember through a daily reiteration of a series of haptic experiences of odours, temperatures, sounds and textures, that are shaped and informed by the environment in which they take place.

The ductile nature of these entities, that keep informing and moulding each other, encountered in the so called phenomenon of globalization, the unforeseen menacing threat of obliteration.

Yet, the same reason as the success of the meaning of ritual as a best selling point for multinational corporations is the so desperately craved but never entirely uncovered mystery of the authenticity and identity.

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Elusive Culture

In the “elusiveness of culture: some questions on intercultural interaction” Brown reminds us of the suggestion made by the SCHOSA conference in spring 2008 that the reading of a culture is commonly and uncritically made around three key attributes: “a distinctive group of people, an identifiable place and a marked time”1. Furthermore, Brown explains how specifying a culture following the above suggestion would be an “elusive endeavor”2 as the above attributes assume a complete separation of a culture from its political and social circumstances.

On the other hand, the common perception of a culture indeed seems to be of a certain group of people, that come from a specific territory (mostly, precisely corresponding to national, geographic borders) and chronologically stable3. So, that we commonly think of ourselves as having a clear perception of a culture. Although we are well aware of certain phenomena such as globalization, nevertheless, we tend to see them as separate occurrences, detached from a “true” identity that we perceive as rooted in that place.

In this context I would like to frame a line of enquiry that I would like to carry out through the study of the origins and the perception of a particular culinary and cultural product, the pasta alla carbonara. This very simple dish seems to be both, inside and outside the Italian borders, one of the few cultural products that bonds the Northerners and the Southerners, the seas and the mountains of that beautiful peninsula, my Country of birth. In addition, food seems to me to cross the boundaries between the “outside world” and our body, so that we experience a fusion between the two. Food here is read as a media to explore a place as a phenomenon of direct experience, which rejects the formality of a geographical language4.

“Cuisine is a function of the genius loci, the spirit of the place. And one who says “place” also says “season”, one who says “earth” also says “heaven”.

Allan Weiss, Culinary manifestation of the genius loci.5

1 Robert Brown, ‘The elusiveness of culture: some questiones on intercultural interaction’, in Engaging in Archi-tectural Education (London: London Metropolitan University, 2011), p.50.2 Brown, The elusiveness of culture, p.50.3 Brown, The elusiveness of culture, p.50.4 Edward Relph, ‘Place and placelessness’, (London: Pion Limited, 2008) p. 6.5 Allan Weiss, ‘Culinari manifestation of the genius loci’, in Eating Architecture ed. by Jamie Horwitz and Paulette Singley (London, The MIT University Press Cambridge Massachusetts, 2004) p.21.

What a sauce can say about us - A history in three ingredients

If asked about the history of this dish, the majority of people would answer with certitude, that pasta alla carbonara has ancient and mysterious origins, rooted in the history of the capital Rome and in the myth of its foundation.

Some people might also recall that it was the carbonari, the charcoal burners in the mountains of Lazio (the roman region), who cooked for the first time the juicy condiment6. However, other versions of the story are also available, attributing the creation of the dish to the Carbonari, a secret society prominent in the early repressed stages of Italian reunification. Or the one that, in the absence of an earlier record in the Anglophone culinary literature before Elisabeth David’s Italian Food was published in Great Britain in 1954, set a much more recent historical frame around the dish, accrediting the recipe to the convenience of putting together the eggs and bacon, supplied by troops from the United States during the Second World War7. However, it is most probably quite a lost cause trying to find the origins of the dish through interrogating the origins of its name. The dish, in fact, come from a family of dishes involving pasta with bacon, cheese, and pepper, such as pasta alla gricia and it is also very similar to the southern Italian pasta cacio e uova, dressed with melted lard and mixed eggs and cheese8 and served in the emptied cheese wheel itself, so that the name might be a lot more recent then the dish itself.

Moving away from the origins, in the attempt to find the recipe, I soon realized that one recipe doesn’t really exist. Each book, each family, each restaurant has its own version, and as long as they are Italian they will start the exegesis with the declaration of the true an sole authenticity and genuineness of their own edition, encouraging you to demolish any previous belief or instruction you might have encountered before then.

However variable it might be, in any of the recipes, there are some similarities: some sort of pasta, eggs, a cheese and a fatty meaty element.

Pasta, a palimpsest in its own right

Robert Brown and Patrick Clark in the paper “Performance and Palimpsest” in an investigation of landscape discuss the world palimpsest, indicating not only something “reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form” with a connotation of “layering built up over time” but also as an acknowledgment of a shift, flux and ephemerality

6 Anna Del Conte, ‘Italian Kitchen’ (London: Square Peg, 2012), p. 123.7 Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonara, as accessed on the 25th of April 2013.8 Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonara, as accessed on the 25th of April 2013.

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determined by some different condition of a culture such as economics, politics, ecology, social conditions and memory, as part of a metamorphosis of a particular state9.

All the above assumes the veracity of Bhabha’s suggestion that all cultures are hybrids subjected to a relentless process of transformation10, so that we have a series of entities, some sort of energetic bundles that move in time while shifting and encountering each other and, once they have touched, they alter and influence each other.

But to which extent is it possible to peel back the different layers of added conditions in order to discover the original skeleton of a cultural product? And ultimately, is there a skeleton? And if we assume that that skeleton should be a one and true recipe, then doesn’t the fact that everybody is convinced of the authenticity of their own recipe make this authenticity exist and disappear at the same time?

Pasta, a political matter

If once we have examined a culture, we find out that “culture is not ideologically neutral, but rather that is a politically and socially loaded idea”11 , how did this dish cope with those political, social, changes?

“On the 15th of November 1930, at a banquet at the restaurant Penna d’Oca in Milan, the futurist poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti launched his much publicized campaign against all established form of cooking and, in particular, against pastas-ciutta. ‘Futurist cooking, said Marinetti, will be liberated from the ancient obsession of weight and volume, and one of its principal aims will be the abolition of pastas-ciutta. Pastasciutta, however grateful to the palate, is an obsolete food; it is heavy, brutalizing and gross; its nutritive qualities are deceptive: it induces skepticism, sloth and pessimism’. The day after this diatribe was delivered the Italian press broke into an uproar; all classes participated in the dispute which ensued. Every time pastas-ciutta was served either in a restaurant or in a private house interminable arguments aroused. Doctors with caution would say that ‘Habitual and exaggerated consump-tion of pastasciutta is fattening, while consumers of pasta have slow and placid characters, meat eaters are quick and aggressive’.

9 Robert Brown and Patrick Clark, ‘Performance and Palimpsest: Reconstructing National Identity in the land-scape of Riga, Latvia’ in Architecture and the Construction of Identity, ed. by R. Queck, (Liverpool: University of Liverpool press, 2013), p. 8.10 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation’ in The Location of Culture, (London, Routledge, 1994), p. 212. 11 R. Brown, The elusiviness of culture, p. 51.

Behind this amiable fooling lurked a sinister note: the fascist obsession with nation-alism and patriotism, the war to come. ‘Spaghetti is not food for fighters, pastasciutta is anti-virile’”. Elisabeth David, Italian Food12

The interesting thing about this story, in relation to Bhabha’s statement of hybridity is that in this particular case it was left to the internal force of futurism to try and change one of the most deep-rooted culinary rituals, rather then an external, trans-border culture. Futurism was in fact a force from inside, promoting velocity and dynamism of its own nation, concentrating on the future and cutting links with the past. But however strong and long the futuristic influence and consequently fascism was, Italians never abandoned their love for pasta.

The identity of pasta eaters

I now remember one of my favorite novels ‘Uno Nessuno e Centomila’ (translated ‘One, no one a hundred thousand’) by Luigi Pirandello, in which the protagonist Vitangelo Moscarda discovers that everyone he knows, including his beloved wife, have constructed a Vitangelo persona in their own imagination different and distorted to the image that he has of himself. He then soon comes to the recognition that, although he only has one body, his spirit is far from being singular, uncovering a desegregation of our identity and the complex multiplicity of our being.

I wonder if in the carbonara case it is just the opposite situation: don’t we all believe that there is one and only carbonara “spirit” of creamy egg and crunchy lardoons peppery spaghetti for the whole nation, but a different carbonara “body” each time a plate of pasta is put in front of us?

Then suddenly it occurs to me. Pasta alla carbonara always existed in a sort of energetic bundle of few frugal ingredients but at some point we felt the need to give a name to that body of juicy eggy spaghetti, and we had to find it a story. It doesn’t matter if there are a hundred thousand ways of doing it and a hundred thousand stories of the origins, what matters is that we give an identity and a place to that body.

Robert Brown, notes that different discourses attest to the centrality of the body in framing our sense of place and identity, remarking finally that “place and identity are thus not separated from the body, but are intrinsically constituted in it”13. In this case I would suggest reading the food as the physical element of the body, and our body as place.

12 Elisabeth David, ‘Italian Food’, (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd, 1975), p.93.13 Robert Brown, ‘Emplacement embodiment and ritual, some considerations from shikii wo matagu for our understanding of place and identity’ (London: Routledge, 2013, forthcoming) p. 17.

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Texts exchange between m

y friends Cristian and Jonny, 23.3.2013 around 1.20 pm

, Udine, Italy.

Cristian: Was it you the other day that was talking about the original recipe for the carbonara?

Jonny: No but if you want it I’ve got it! I did some thorough research.

Cristian: Yes please give me everything youhave… a friend of mine needs it!

Jonny: Originally carbonara wasn’t the way we know it but it was prepared only with

egg, guanciale and cheese. They used to cook the guanciale with the onion and consequent-ly the egg was cracked and tossed directly

on the pasta. They used guanciale because is very fat and they didn’t need any other oil or condiment. The tradition wants that cor-bonara was the pasta of the charcoal burn-ers, who, spending many days in the forest, were taking these few ingredients with them

as they were lasting a long time without rotting. Others say that the name comes from the observation that the grated pepper looks

like coal powder.Anyway, carbonara as we all know it is a consequence of the Second World War, when the Americans brought bacon and powdered egg, so that’s way we now whisk the eggs

aside and use the pancetta instead of guan-ciale.

If you ask around everybody will tell you a different story, but who cares?

Cristian: Good boy! Carry on!

Jonny: No I think that’s all!

Jonny: A personal thought: I think that af-ter the National football team, carbonara is the one thing that brings all the Italians

together!

I don’t particularly know if I am Italian, being raised by the border with Austria by an Austrian father and spending my summers between Vienna and the Alps, but when I eat a carbonara the food in front of me disappears. I am instead in a different kitchen, refuge from the brackish air that just about penetrates from the tall window on the left above the sink. An old wooden chair scraping noise against the cold hard floor finds the place for a wobbly wine-stained dining table, where people rested several smoking bowls of pasta, flasks of house wine, did homework in the afternoon and counted money at night. I might not be Italian but in that moment I become.

An identity of Italian home, refuge and recollection of a family, an identity of frugality, precariousness and yet of an intense and sophisticated bond finds its place of existence every time the fork first selects and then winds a few spaghetti and a few lardoons together. Eating we find a place in our stomach for that identity and for that body, by doing so we recreate an emotion, a memory, an image of what that identity in our imagination is, and we become part of it.

Forget modernity and velocity, dinner is served!

The making of a sauce - Pasta, a ritual

Bhabha’s statement is almost indisputable, change does affect every aspect of our life and part of the origin of this change is contact with other cultures. So that also, that one recipe, that doesn’t really exist, must have changed.

Or is the secret in the ritual of the making rather than in the result itself? If that is the case, it seems prudent to conclude that, the change will be disclosed in the act of making rather than in the recipe.

The ritual of making (or cooking) pasta, as making of the everyday14, is well known by marketing industries. An example is given by one of the largest advertising campaigns in Italy for Barilla, a leading pasta maker company. Different stories are told in the television advertisement. The family father that is kissing his children goodbye to go on a business trip abroad and the little daughter slips a fusillo (a bit of pasta in the shape of a swirl) in his pocket, which he will then find when in a hotel room far away from home. Or the couple that with one in Rome and the other one in London, are cooking the same plate of pasta and eat together while chatting on internet. All these stories end with the caption “dove c’è Barilla c’è casa” (where there’s Barilla, there’s home).

This advertising campaign comprehend what Juhani Pallasmaa described about the

14 Robert Brown, ‘You Can’t Go Home Again: The place of tradition in “Firefly’s” dystopian-utpian and utopia-distopia’, in Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Reviw vol. XXII n. II, spring 2011, pp. 8–15.

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essence of home, being a “diffuse and complex condition that integrates memories and images, desires and fears, the past and the present. A home is also a set of rituals, personal rhythms and routines of the everyday life”15.

The ritual of mettere su la pasta (literally “putting on” the pasta) filling the large pan with fresh water, putting it on the stove then lighting the flame. Dipping the hand in the pot of coarse salt and once that the water is boiled, there is the glance to the kitchen clock, the start of making the sauce, the repetition of the everyday. Hence, the production of a “sense of place and community belonging … through shared, ritualized practices in the public realm”16.Gestures that transform the raw ingredients, that lay the table, hands and faces that need to be washed and be “presentable” for the table, the wait for the other people to gather. The kitchen becomes the setting around which the ritualized performance is unraveled and assimilated once again, by the so (re)created haptic experiences of textures, smells, temperatures.

Central are the concepts of emplacement and embodiment17. We emplace the ritual in a setting, that is understood by the participants as the site of this ritual and, consequently, the environment is “conceptually re-schematized” and identified with the act.18 Coincident with the emplacement is the assimilation of the ritual and its meaning inside the body, that becomes thus a site of cultural expression. The body, however, “is not simply a container for the mind as the primary site of experience and understanding” but it is an “entity capable of experiencing and synthesizing that experience. Consequently, the body is not only “culturally shaped but also supports yet inflicts culturally-legible signification, while culture equally is both embodied and challenged through corporeal performance”. Hence there is a “critical circularity”19 between the “emplacement of ritualized meaning and the simultaneous embodiment of meaning”.20

The global supermarket shelf

The (re)iteration of the ritualized practice and body performance, although forging and forged in their turn by the spatial recognition of the environment in which they take place, foster “a sense of purpose are capable of (re)structuring place and experience beyond the specific (i.e. original) site and body gestures. While informed by past conditions and

15 Juhani Pallasmaa, ‘Identity Intimacy and Domicile: Notes on the Phenolmenolgy of Home’, Arkkitehti – Finnish Architectural Review 1/1994, pp. 44 -49.16 R. Brown, ‘Eplacement embodiment and ritual’ p. 5.17 R. Brown, ‘Eplacement embodiment and ritual’ p. 4.18 R. Brown, ‘Eplacement embodiment and ritual’ p. 6.19 Catherine Bell, ‘Ritual Theory, ritual practice’, (New York Oxford University Press, 1992), as referenced by R. Brown, ‘Eplacement embodiment and ritual’ p. 4.20 R. Brown, ‘Eplacement embodiment and ritual’ pp. 6-9.

experiences, they enables us to cope with changing situations in the future; equally we can adapt them to other contexts”21.

Unquestionably globalization has certainly an impact on culinary habits, even Italian ones. The impact that is received by and inflicted to our identity, through mass media, travels and so forth, shifts and alters the way we “emplace upon the environment our own understanding built up through prior experience, beliefs and values”22.

I was surprised to discover that celebrity chefs like Nigella Lawson and Jamie Oliver propose their own version of the carbonara sauce, without claiming to be the authentic one. Jamie suggests adding peas or sausages23, whilst Nigella, more indulgently, dry wine or Vermouth24. But if it is not congenial to be part of their “fan club” and “authenticity” is still the desired one, I am afraid the search is still not fruitful. It seems like the craving for “the authentic one” keeps generating more authentic ones. In fact, it is not the Pirandellean fragmentation of the spirit of the sauce that has changed, but the environment in which we emplace the ritual of making and consuming. Indeed, a family kitchen is no longer the only place of the ritual. Instead we get to supermarkets to buy pots of sauce or to questionable take-aways to get our lunch. We consume it alone, the table most of the times disappears, we find ourselves in alienating waiting rooms, in companies’ canteens, talking to strangers not even eating with us, we rush it and then pushing the box away from us, we decide not to have that again.

Augè in Non-places notes that supermodernity “produces non-places, meaning spaces which are not themselves anthropological places and which, … do not integrate the earlier places: instead these are listed, classified, promoted to the state of memory”. However places and non-places “are like palimpsests on which the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten” being the former never entirely obliterated, and the latter never entirely completed25.

“A world where people are born in the clinic and died in hospital, where transit points and temporary abodes are proliferating under luxurious or inhuman condition, where a dense network of means of transport which are also inhabited spaces is develop-ing; where the habitué of supermarkets, slot machines and credit cards communi-cate wordlessly; … a world thus surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary and ephemeral, offers the anthropologist a new object, whose unprecedented dimension might usefully be measured before we start wondering to

21 R. Brown, ‘Eplacement embodiment and ritual’ p. 11.22 R. Brown, ‘Eplacement embodiment and ritual’ p. 7.23 Jamieoliver.com,www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/search/?q=carbonara&search_category=recipes, as accessed on the 1st of May 2013.24 Nigella.com, www.nigella.com/recipes/view/spaghetti-alla-carbonara-127, as accessed on the 1st of May 2013.25 Marc Augé, ‘Non-places an Introduction to Supermodernity’ (London: Verso, 2008), p. 63.

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what sort of gaze it may be amenable”.26

In this substantial change of setting, the experience of the meaning has been irrevocably displaced, whilst the body is not longer able to either reproduce or assimilate the haptic experience offered by the ritual . The ritual of the making, instead, together with the identity and meaning that are carried with it, is illusionistically packed up in a disinfected plastic pot of ready-made sauce, where three basic ingredients are replaced with a long list of powders, numbers and stabilizers. And we are all deceived by the ruse of a global supermarket shelf.

26 M. Augé, Non-places, pp. 63 -64.

Bibliography

Augé, Marc, Non-places an Introduction to Supermodernity (London: Verso, 2008).

Bhabha, Homi K., ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation’ in The Location of Culture, (London, Routledge, 1994).

Robert Brown, ‘Eplacement embodiment and ritual, some considerations from shikii wo matagu for our understanding of place and identity’ (London: Routledge, 2013, forthcoming).

Brown, Robert ,‘The elusiveness of culture: some questiones on intercultural interaction’, in Engaging in Architectural Education (London: London Metropolitan University, 2011) pp. 49-53.

Brown, Robert and Clark, Patrick, ‘Performance and Palimpsest: Reconstructing National Identity in the landscape of Riga, Latvia’ in Architecture and the Construction of Identity, ed. by R. Queck, (Liverpool: University of Liverpool press, 2013), pp. 1-27.

Brown, Robert, ‘You Can’t Go Home Again: The place of tradition in “Firefly’s” dystopian-utpian and utopia-distopia’, in Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Reviw vol. XXII n. II, spring 2011, pp. 7-18.

Del Conte, Anna, Italian Kitchen (London: Square Peg, 2012)

David, Elisabeth, Italian Food (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd, 1975).

Pallasmaa, Juhani, ‘Identity Intimacy and Domicile: Notes on the Phenolmenolgy of Home’, Arkkitehti – Finnish Architectural Review 1/1994, pp. 44 -49.Relph, Edward, Place and placelessness, (London: Pion Limited, 2008).

Weiss, Allan, ‘Culinari manifestation of the genius loci’, in Eating Architecture ed. by Jamie Horwitz and Paulette Singley (London, The MIT University Press Cambridge Massachu-setts, 2004) pp. 21-33.

Image References

All images by author

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