Presented by
Anthony F. Buccini, PhD

Long regarded as emblematic for Roman cookery and now internationally beloved as a delicious representative of Italy’s emerging national cuisine, spaghetti alla carbonara has –– not surprisingly –– been the subject of considerable speculation, debate and even teeth-gnashing with regard both to the ‘authenticity’ of different recipes and to the circumstances of the dish’s invention. Indeed, the various theories proposed for the origins of this pairing of pasta, pork, cheese and eggs illustrate a remarkable range of possible accounts for such cultural items and yet few of these pass beyond the anecdotal and none considers broadly the cultural context in which the dish arose.

The goal of this paper is two-fold: first, to examine carefully the origins of this dish in terms of the broader socio-economic and aesthetic contexts in which it arose; second, to show how some of the fanciful aetiologies for the dish exemplify popular (mis-) conceptions of culinary history.

Anthony F. Buccini received his undergraduate education at Columbia University in the City of New York (B.A.) and his graduate education at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. (Ph.D.); he also studied and later conducted research as a Fulbright Scholar at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. He has published and taught extensively in his primary fields of historical linguistics and sociolinguistics, especially in connection with the Germanic, Romance and Celtic languages. He is currently working on two monographs, one on the influence of Celtic on English in the early Middle Ages, the other on selected topics in the culinary history of the Western Mediterranean.

Dr. Buccini’s presentation will be based on his paper “The Burning Question of Carbonara:Fanciful Aetiologies,Practical and Aesthetic Realities,” which he also presented at the 2006 Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery.

Program was hosted at Kendall College.