Last night, I had the immensely good fortune of being a guest in the home of professor Michele Antonio Fino, director of the Master’s in Wine Culture program at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Piedmont where I’m currently teaching a seminar on wine writing. But as if my stars hadn’t already aligned, my luck […]
Earlier this week, I was a presenter at the Taste of Italy trade fair and festival in Houston. The marquee event of the festival was a seminar on carbonara, including a talk on the origins of the history of the dish by me and my colleague Chris Reid, a food writer for the Houston Chronicle […]
From the department of “food for thought”… Text, extratext, metatext, paratext… None intrigues me more than hypertext. “hypertext, text which does not form a single sequence and which may be read in various orders” (Oxford English Dictionary). In 1997, critical theorist Gérard Genette, a giant among literary scholars, wrote: “Our ‘media’ age has seen the […]
Above: my friend and client Tony Vallone’s new “Spaghetti alla Carbonara” is as blasphemous as it is delicious. It was a thrill for Tracie P and me to take our Australian friends, the newly engaged Lydia and Stefano, to Tony’s, the flagship restaurant of my friend and client Tony Vallone in Houston. The couple is […]
Above: My wife Tracie P’s Carbonara. As Charles Scicolone would say, I am truly blessed. Italian cuisine is a world cuisine. Even in its most perverse expressions (Olive Garden?), it is immediately and unmistakably recognizable. And while French haute cuisine remains one of world’s benchmark for fine dining, Italian gastronomy is perhaps the world’s most […]
Above: Tracie P’s Carbonara last night. To borrow an expression from Charles Scicolone, “I am blessed.” “One of the things that is endlessly appealing about New York, for anyone with more than a passive interest in food,” wrote Craig Claiborne in the New York Times in 1965, “is a continual sense of discovery either in […]
Above: Tracie P adds onion to her Carbonara, just another idiosyncratic — and delicious — interpretation of this recipe (the above was one of the dishes in last night’s dinner at our house). Premise Perhaps more than any other recipe in the Italian gastronomic canon, spaghetti alla carbonara and its origins have perplexed and eluded gastronomers […]
I just had to share this image, snapped last night at Vino Vino in Austin, where Hammond B-3 player Mike Flanigin and Gary Clark Jr. have been performing on Mondays. To my palate, Gary is one of the greatest blues players in the world today and to get to hear him play in small room […]
Yesterday was international Carbonara Day and New York hosted a number of carbonara celebrations organized by the GVCI (Virtual Group of Italian Chefs). The origin of Spaghetti alla carbonara is unknown but the GVCI has put together this relatively well-informed page citing all the theories as to its provenance (I was glad to see that […]
Above: one of the best executions of spaghetti alla carbonara I’ve ever had was prepared by a Roman using guanciale and Pecorino Romano. The cook in question is one of the most brilliant and informed writers in Italy I know. But does he know the origins of his city’s synecdoche dish? “A philologist looks behind […]
Do Bianchi 