Both gricia and amatriciana, too other famous pasta dishes from the same region use the same cheese (pecorino) and guanciale. In fact carbonara is nothing more than a gricia with egg yolks.
It just makes no sense to have parmiggiano or french cheese in a recipe coming from a region that did not have these ingredients in the first place and are not part of its culinary history.
And thus the point of authenticity is into rooting where the recipe originated with local ingredients.
Anybody's free to change the recipe all they want, but to call it carbonara when ingredients don't match is misleading the customer expecting a roman dish with roman ingredients.
But people have an irrational desire treat food as some sacred, immutable artifact.
Asian restaurant cuisine is judged by partly by how different (technique, taste, looks) the dish is from what they can make from home.
You go to a Chinese restaurant to eat something that cannot be made at home, almost by definition. The only exception might be breakfast food.
What's even more interesting is no one actually makes butter or tikka chicken at home, or has a tandoor to do so, but Indians also don't eat it outside generally, instead it's mainly foreigners who like those dishes.
In the context of food, I laugh at notions of authenticity and tradition - unless the time scale is over 1000 years there's not much interesting to talk about.
Anyway, obviously cultural identity isn’t inherent: you know what you grew up with. And it can easily turn toxic when we move from appreciating our own culture to putting down others’. But my life would be a lot poorer without it.
Recipes are a snapshot of economic and technological advances of the time, and whole classes of recipe are not available until certain technological watersheds, like
* precise temperature controls for ovens and stoves in the early 20th century
* cheap and health(ier) chemical leaveners in the late 19th century
* discovery of consistent vanilla pollination in the 19th century
* exchanges of ingredients in the Columbian exchange (tomatoes in Italy, potatoes in Russia, chilis in India and Korea, etc.)
Also our modern supply chain is very good at magicking away the seasonality and perishability of ingredients, so for example you had early Scottish shortbread primarily using rice flour because it was cheaper at that time.
I don’t think it’s true that most food sucked at any point, except for people in exceptional circumstances.
What era of history are we talking about here? Would it have been transported as flour, or ground locally?
It shouldn't even mean this much, frankly, as those things are merely protectionist trade policies meant to artificially drive up the price of certain goods without regard for quality. People on the Internet give too much deference to politicized trade regulations.
Suppose people say it; why shouldn't they be entitled to their opinion? How does it harm anyone? People who like New York style pizza are equally free to just disagree, and keep making it.
So I get it when Italians get offended by our poor rendering of carbonara... and feel that what we get here is off.
Everyone has their own personal limit and variations are allowed within certain unwritten boundaries. Swedish meatballs, for example, can be varied in many ways - but if you put garlic in them, I think you should call them something else.
enaaem•51m ago