Oh dear, it’s another day in which I’m struggling to think of something interesting to write. Well, when in doubt, write about food, right? Right!

So, tonight for dinner I am planning to make spaghetti alla carbonara, a yummy, creamy, hammy, cheesy dish which should warm us up on a wet and windy night. Though many non-Italian pasta alla carbonara recipes use cream to get the right creamy texture, and even add onions and other ingredients, traditional carbonara is made only with raw eggs, cured pork, butter or oil, and tasty, tasty cheese.

I’ve never tried making “proper” carbonara like this, but tonight I’m going to take it on. I plan to follow the recipe in The Silver Spoon, a massive monster of an Italian cookbook originally published in 1950 and just translated into English within the last few years. I got the book for Christmas two years ago, and it’s been a brilliant source of knowledge when I want to make Italian food like the Italians make it.

My carbonara won’t be entirely traditional, unfortunately; I don’t have a ready source of guanciale, the unsmoked pork jowl usually used for carbonara, so I’ll substitute pancetta instead, and I couldn’t get hold of sheepy pecorino romano cheese so I’ll use the regal parmesan in its place. As long as I manage to avoid scrambling the eggs when I mix them with the cooked pasta (a very real danger when attempting pasta alla carbonara), then we should be good to go.

Incidentally, I was interested to read on the Wikipedia page for carbonara that the dish is apparently known as “coal miner’s spaghetti” in some parts of the States since carbonara is related to the Italian word for charcoal and, legend has it, the dish may have originally been prepared for “charcoal workers.” Even more interestingly, there’s no record of pasta alla carbonara being eaten in Italy before WWII, and it may be that the dish came about thanks to the US troops who supplied eggs and bacon to the Italians—and then took the popular pasta alla carbonara back home with them in the form of “coal miner’s spaghetti.” Whether that’s true or not no one really knows, but it’s a nice story for a nice dish.

Time to mangia mangia!