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.

Asian restaurant cuisine is judged by partly by how different (technique, taste, looks) the dish is from what they can make from home.

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.

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.

So I get it when Italians get offended by our poor rendering of carbonara... and feel that what we get here is off.

I suspect if people just said pasta with pork egg and cheese no one is going to make a big deal out of authenticity.

In other words, this is about words more than anything. They do matter, in the sense that most people would be upset to order a pizza and get a sandwich or order a sandwich and get a taco.

You don't need to leave italian (American) food to see the same phenomenon the author describes. Pizza is also endlessly re-interpreted and adapted. There's value in protecting and exploring. So while I share some of the author's opinions, I think the whole locking recipes into imaginary vaults thing is a bit overblown.

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.

Striving for authenticity is essentially a pause button. While we should absolutely preserve culturally important recipes[1], we also need to move forward and invent the stuff that people in 2080 will call 'authentic.'

Bring on the durian pizza, the strawberry Mapo tofu, and the Kraft singles in Korean army stews. Food is meant to be enjoyed. Don't gatekeep and keep the performative taste-signaling to wine and coffee please.

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[1] As a side note, a lot of culturally important recipes are actually imports. Tomatoes weren't even available in Italy until the 1600s, Neither did Ireland have potatoes until they were brought over from the New World. Most contemporary Chinese dishes were created in the last century; fish and chip was brought over to the UK by Jewish immigrants; the famous red peppers of Sichuan didn't make its way to China until like the 1600s; Japanese tempura was brought over by Portuguese Catholic missionaries; banh mi has its origin in Vietnam during French colonial rule; national dish of UK is chicken tikka masala; al pastor tacos was brought over by Lebanese immigrants; pad thai was literally invented by the government of Thailand to foster Thai identify. List goes on.

Nowadays, it is very difficult to find someone who makes brigadeiro or milk pudding without condensed milk, almost always using that ingredient plus sugar, which often produces a sickly sweet mush.

In fact, the whole history of how sugar, or sucrose, entered the human diet is fascinating. It brings together slavery, the exploitation of Indigenous peoples, plantation agriculture in Spanish America and Brazil, and the interests of kings, merchants, and so on. And Nestlé. :)

I think there's an element of expectation-setting when we're talking about authenticity. Personally, I wouldn't sweat authenticity too much. There's excellent food to be had by mixing and remixing dishes.

Myself, I am not from Valencia, actually my home town is on the opposite side of the country, so I don't care so much what you put on it as long as you follow a few basic principles and don't commit the great heresy of using chorizo xD