4 days ago
‘The English always ruin our recipes': The pasta dish that made Italy irate
Pasta, pepper, pecorino. And… butter? Cacio e pepe, the creamy pasta dish, is traditionally composed of just three ingredients. But not according to Good Food, formerly owned by the BBC, which recently published a recipe for the traditional Roman favourite that snuck in a fourth.
The website, which says the pasta dish makes for an 'easy, speedy lunch', calls for spaghetti (or, controversially, the thicker pasta bucatini), ground black pepper, pecorino and butter. It even adds insult to injury by suggesting that the pecorino could be substituted with plain old parmesan (many pasta purists would argue it cannot).
A small change, perhaps, but one that has escalated into a full-blown crisis leading to a complaint being lodged at the British embassy, outraged headlines splashed over local papers and Roman chefs up in arms at the bastardisation of a beloved dish. Adding butter to cacio e pepe, they argue, is heresy – as is suggesting that a delicate, surprisingly complicated recipe is both 'easy' and 'speedy'. The creaminess of the sauce must come from the combination of starchy pasta water and pecorino cheese alone. They join a long line of Italians complaining about how the British – and others – treat their cuisine, from mild misdemeanours, like putting cheese on seafood pasta, to the cardinal sin of cream in a carbonara.
Paolo Catarinozzi, owner of Zi Umberto, a restaurant specialising in classic Roman dishes in the heart of the capital's Trastevere district, pulls no punches. He describes the Good Food recipe, which appears to have been online for several months but has only now triggered a dispute, as 'disgusting'.
'It is another dish altogether,' he says. 'It is offensive. The English always ruin our recipes, because they try to adapt Italian recipes to please their customers, instead of producing dishes as they should be made.'
Catarinozzi runs his restaurant – which serves cacio e pepe as it ought to be served, at least according to his clientele – with his daughter Alice. 'For us it is not just about the food,' she says. 'These are recipes [perfected] by our grandparents – it is about respecting what they gave us, protecting their memories.'
Others have gone further still with their criticism. Coldiretti, Italy 's largest farmers' organisation, released a statement that called distorted recipes such as the Good Food's cacio e pepe a 'gastronomic 'gallery of horrors''. Another case is 'spaghetti bolognese, a dish that is practically unknown in traditional Italian cuisine but very popular abroad, especially in the United Kingdom', it continued.
Irate Italophiles have always complained about the British take on Italian classics, but not until now has anyone attempted to escalate it to a diplomatic crisis.
One disgruntled association of restaurateurs in the Italian capital is so het up about the addition of butter to the Good Food recipe that it has lodged a complaint with the British embassy in Rome.
Claudio Pica, president of the Rome branch of the restaurant association Fiepet-Confesercenti, said the recipe is akin to 'us coming to Britain and demanding the finest double malt whisky mixed with lemonade' in a letter addressed to Good Food and diplomats in the capital. The embassy declined to comment when contacted by The Telegraph.
Picking up on the tensions, one headline in an Italian newspaper read, 'Butter and parmesan in… cacio e pepe! Stunned! The British embassy informed!' Another, the Rome-based Il Messaggero, quipped: 'Paraphrasing the famous British anthem 'God save the king', Rome restaurateurs are now saying: 'God save the cacio e pepe.'' But is this a valiant battle to protect the heart of Italian cuisine, or just a storm in a saucepan?
As Francesco Mazzei, one of the leading Italian chefs in the UK, argues, adding butter is a shortcut, perhaps even a cop-out. 'NO butter,' he says, emphatically. 'Let's put it this way. It's easy to make a cacio e pepe with butter. It's extremely difficult to make a cacio e pepe with no butter.' Mazzei argues that while the recipe might appear to be simple, 'simplicity is also sophistication. You need to know how to do it. It's all about skills and years and years and years of technique.'
Not everybody agrees. Conor Gadd, chef-owner at Trullo, a leading Italian restaurant in north London, is 'unapologetic' about his use of butter in his restaurant's version of the dish.
He does, however, describe developing his take on the classic as the 'bane of my life'. 'Adding butter isn't traditional, and Italians are the very essence of traditionalism,' says Gadd. 'We played around with it for years, adding pecorino, parmesan, we used egg yolk sometimes, and eventually, we said, 'what are we doing here?' I'm not Italian. I don't have to stick to how my mother taught me to do things.'
'Italian cooking is very simple, very pure, with an innate trust in the quality of ingredients,' he continues. That's all well and good, but 'the reason we would add butter is to adapt it to the British palette'. Quite simply, with a knob of butter, the pasta just tastes better. And, he adds, 'on a cold night in north London, I think people just appreciate a bit of butter'.
Perhaps this is exactly why the Good Food concoction does appear to have pleased British home cooks – creamier, potentially tastier, and better suited to our climes. One suspiciously well-placed commenter on the website's recipe page posted: 'I can't believe adding a [little] butter turned this from a boring traditional recipe into something I actually like eating. This is one of those examples where a small update makes all the difference!'
Good Food has responded to the uproar by removing a line from the recipe that suggested it includes 'four simple ingredients – spaghetti, pepper, parmesan and butter'. The company said via a spokesman that it has 'been in touch with the Fiepet-Confesercenti association to explain that our recipe is designed to be easy to use for home cooks using readily available ingredients in the UK'.
'With that in mind, we have edited the copy at the start of the recipe to make this clear and we have invited the Roman restaurant association to supply us with an authentic Italian version that we would love to upload and credit to them,' the spokesman added.
Some adaptations are indeed necessitated by what's available (or not) on British supermarket shelves, which are not known to be heaving with the finest pecorino and perfectly cured guanciale. However, Britons do have a long and illustrious history of butchering the beloved Italian classics. There was a similar outcry when Mary Berry published a bolognese recipe that included double cream and white wine.
Nigella Lawson also found herself in hot water when she had the audacity to put nutmeg and double cream in her carbonara; despite the fact that she adds double cream to nearly everything, she was accused of heralding the 'death of Italian cuisine'. And let's not forget the more recent carbonara crisis, when The New York Times suggested that tomatoes belong in the creamy, silky spaghetti dish.
'Tomatoes are not traditional in carbonara, but they lend a bright tang to the dish,' a piece published by NYT Cooking in 2021 read. Backlash was immediate, and fierce, with some critics arguing the recipe 'should be illegal'.
And then there are the Frankensteinian horrors we – or America – have created ourselves: spaghetti and meatballs, ham and pineapple on pizza, and the atrocity that is Heinz tinned carbonara.
However, the truth is that many of the recipes heralded as Italian classics have a history – and origin – that is fiercely contested. Luca Cesari, a leading food historian has suggested that according to the first carbonara recipe, unearthed from 1954, the dish should be made with pancetta (bacon) rather than the guanciale (pork jowl) that any self-respecting Italian would insist upon. He received death threats. Alberto Grandi, an Italian academic and pasta myth-buster, has gone so far as to suggest that many of the Italian classics, from pizza to panettone, are either relatively recent inventions or – shock horror – not even Italian recipes at all. He has even claimed that carbonara was an American invention.
So, yes, buttery cacio e pepe may be an aberration, or at the very least a shameless adaptation. But if the Italians are at it too, is that really such a crime?
