Comic Strips

Italians demand our respect for their culinary traditions when Carbonara is literally a ~~19th~~ 20th century invention. Ridiculous! Next time I'm having pasta, I'm putting ketchup on it to intentionally dishonor them

Nothing I hate more than food snobs, put whatever you want in your food

Last night, I watched Chinese Cooking Demystified's most recent video where they trace the history of mapo tofu to the best of their abilities. It was a fascinating watch where they had a particular recipe incarnation that defied their old definition of proper mapo tofu. At the end of the video they note how it's transformed over the years noting that there's an obsession these days for an authentic way of preparing dishes often using this point as a reason to criticize a dish. They aren't against criticizing a dish, but call for specific ciriticisms such as flavor balance or shape which is important in Chinese cuisine.

So I went looking though some critiques looking for something about how cream makes it too heavy or hides the flavor of this ingredient or that. What I found was something more exciting. This academic did a quick historical gloss of carbonara and found that several iterations of early carbonara included cream and other taboo ingredients like butter. It wasn't standardized into its canonical form until the 1990s.

Growing up in a traditional household, my parents never worked from recipes, but regularly made delicious dishes beloved by their friends and family members alike. Technique, ingredients, and interests ruled the day. Knowing how to bring out the flavors of the ingredients you had on hand to match each other made delicious food. And the lanes for dishes were much wider because the ingredient lists weren't as rigid. Obviously, a biriyani without rice be confusing if you dared serve it. But do you need kokum or can you use lemon juice? Is a carbonara still a carbonara with cream, with bacon instead of guancole, vegetarian? I don't know. Maybe I care less about the words coming out of my mouth than the food going in it.

I mean, that's just alfredo with bacon at that point.

At least he didn't suggest that health insurance should use a deny, delay, and defend strategy for insurance claim payments

Fuck the original recipe. I've never had better Alfredo or Carbonara than cooking the sauce myself using garlic, heavy cream, parmesan, and a bit of cornstarch slurry to help keep it from breaking.

Either that or we can give the cream version a different name and acknowledge it as a better dish than traditional Alfredo.

i first read this comic as saying “ice cream in carbonara” and thought the injuries were justified. but after rereading it i’m not so sure anymore

Huh. It's never occurred to me to put cream in carbonara, always just thinking of it as the bacon and eggs pasta, don't think I'd like it literally creamy; but I will put a pat of butter in cacio e pepe, to help it emulsify, and was just reading about how that is some sort of heresy too.

That's how I make it.

/has no Italian friends