Authentic Italian

What's the one item you're likely to find on nearly every menu in Italy? If you said spaghetti and meatballs, your answer is plausible, but it's wrong.

Spaghetti and meatballs is actually an American dish, invented, it is true, by Italian immigrants to this country, but invented here nonetheless. Though both meatballs and spaghetti are classic Italian foods, putting them together was something that never occurred to people in the Old Country.

Despite being an American classic, these days you can find spaghetti and meatballs on the menu in Italy, but more often than not at tourist traps. In contrast, the one item you are almost always assured to find on any restaurant menu there is spaghetti carbonara.

Not every eatery in Italy will offer, say, chicken cacciatore, or veal piccata, or even pizza, but spaghetti carbonara is invariably available and it doesn't matter whether the restaurant is huge or just a hole in the wall, fancy or down to earth, expensive or cheap, especially in Rome, where the dish was probably invented.

Now I've not eaten at every restaurant in Rome (don't I wish?), but over the course of several trips to the Eternal City, I've dined in my share. I've yet to find one that does not offer this classic pasta dish.

TOM HARTE ~ photos@semissourian.com Spaghetti carbonara, photographed in Rome where it is a ubiquitous menu item.

Though there are reportedly some 400 versions of the recipe, spaghetti carbonara is fundamentally just warm spaghetti laced with a creamy sauce made of eggs and cheese and studded with cured pork. In other words it's essentially bacon and eggs with pasta. No wonder it's so popular.

Though popular, its origins are not so well known, or, more accurately, well accepted. While some maintain that no cookbook more than 50 years old gives a recipe for the dish, others contend that it can clearly be traced all the way back to Ancient Rome.

Probably the most common theory about the invention of the dish derives from its name. The word carbonara, loosely translated, means "in the manner of the charcoal pit," and comes from the Italian word for coal, carbone, which in turn comes from the Latin, carbo, or coal.

According to this theory, spaghetti carbonara was invented by the men who made charcoal, the carbonai, who toiled in the Apennine Mountains near Rome, camping outdoors for months at a time. They took with them the few ingredients needed to make spaghetti carbonara -- cheese, cured pork, pasta, olive oil, and salt and pepper -- which did not require refrigeration and combined them with eggs, which were readily available at local farms, to create the dish.

In fact, the actress Sophia Loren recounts witnessing exactly this preparation many years ago when, while filming the movie "Two Women," which was shot in the mountains, a group of charcoal workers fixed the dish for her. The liberal smattering of pepper that is called for in the contemporary dish, she and others suggest, represents the specks of coal that would often drop from the workers' clothing as they cooked.

Tom Harte enjoys a plate of spaghetti carbonara in Rome, where it is on nearly every restaurant menu.

Another hypothesis suggests that the dish was actually invented at the Ristorante La Carbonara in the Campo de' Fiori by the owner who had been in the coal business. Still another even credits Allied soldiers who occupied Italy during World War II and contributed their rations of bacon and powdered eggs to the cause of dressing up plain pasta.

Though these theories are debatable, spaghetti carbonara is irrefutable proof of the genius of Italian cooking.

Spaghetti Carbonara

I've tried lots of recipes for pasta carbonara, but this is the one, from the Joy of Cooking, I keep coming back to. It's easy, delicious, and for the most part authentic, unless you substitute cream for the pasta water which, I confess, I usually do.

1 tablespoon olive oil

Tom and Jane Harte enjoy spaghetti carbonara in the Campo de Fiori in Rome where some contend the dish was invented.

6 ounces diced bacon

1 pound spaghetti

1/3 cup pasta water

4 eggs, lightly beaten

1/3 cup grated pecorino cheese

Cook bacon in oil over medium-high heat until crisp. Pour off all but 3 tablespoons of the fat. Cook pasta. Combine pasta water with eggs and cheese. Drain pasta and add to skillet with the bacon. Add egg mixture and toss over medium heat until sauce thickens. Season with pepper. Top with additional grated cheese and serve.

Tom Harte's book, "Stirring Words," is available at local bookstores. A Harte Appetite airs Fridays 8:49 a.m. on KRCU, 90.9 FM. Contact Tom at semissourian.com or at the Southeast Missourian, P.O. Box 699, Cape Girardeau, Mo., 63702-0699.