Nigella’s recipe leaves Italians aghast
SHE may as well have taken off her clothes and danced in the Trevi Fountain: Nigella Lawson has provoked outrage by reinventing a recipe for spaghetti carbonara, perhaps the most classic of all Italian dishes, that includes both double cream and wine.
Italians, excitable at the best of times, are, not surprisingly, appalled.
The television chef posted her recipe for carbonara on her Facebook site so it could be read, cooked and digested by her two million internet followers.
The recipe includes all the usual ingredients for a spaghetti carbonara – namely spaghetti, pancetta, olive oil, eggs, Parmesan and black pepper – but also includes two fluid ounces of double cream and the same amount of dry white wine or vermouth. The bestselling chef also suggests the addition of grated nutmeg to finish it off.
Lawson said she was inspired to make the recipe after watching Meryl Streep cook the dish for Jack Nicholson in the film Heartburn. She wrote: “It is so right, for that chin-dripping, lovesoaked primal feast.”
Antonio Carluccio, the Italian chef, was aghast. He told The Daily Telegraph: “Nigella has the freedom to create whatever she likes, but please don’t call it carbonara. It is the equivalent to me putting tomatoes in a steak and kidney pie. It is unnecessary to ‘improve’ something that is already perfect.”
Italians flocked to her Facebook page to voice their outrage, saying her cooking was a “disgrace” and she might as well “make it with turkey twizzlers”.
One Italian raged: “Nigella you are a wonderful woman but your recipes are the DEATH of Italian recipes, literally! NO CREAM IN CARBONARA NEVER, only eggs.”
Lawson declined to comment but tweeted that the recipe is “not entirely authentic but entirely delicious”.
Italians, we like to think, are famous for their flair, their fashion. When it comes to food, however, it is now sadly possible to detect a flicker of fundamentalism. Or so Nigella Lawson has found, having suggested that her ideal carbonara contained lashings of double cream. No, no, no replied the purists, aghast. Carbonara is made with eggs, cream is sacrilege. But linguine, like language, is a movable feast. Italian cuisine is famous for its experimentation. Who can forget, for example, the novel ingredients introduced to the Banquet of Chestnuts by Cardinal Cesare Borgia in 1501? The Vatican had not seen its like before. Many thought it a blasphemy of its own. And yet, for one reason or another, its reputation continues to echo to this day. Temptation, the Cardinal knew, is the soul of cooking.