Older Than It Looks

 On the Sudden Invention of Ancient Food

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The first time someone explained the true origin of spaghetti alla carbonara to me, I was in a small restaurant in Rome, and the man explaining it was so certain, and so pleased, that it would have been rude to doubt him. The dish, he said, was the food of the carbonari — the charcoal-burners who worked the forests of Lazio and Abruzzo, who needed something cheap and filling that could be cooked over their own fires with what they carried: guanciale, eggs, hard cheese, pepper. The name came from the coal-dust flecks of black pepper across the plate, or from the charcoal-burners themselves, or from both. It was, he said, a dish of the mountains, of the poor, of centuries of woodsmen. He topped up my wine and looked, reasonably, as though he expected applause.

It is a wonderful story. There is very little evidence that any of it is true.

Carbonara, as far as anyone can actually document it, does not appear anywhere — not in a cookbook, not in a menu, not in a newspaper — before about the mid-1940s. Its first traceable printed reference comes around 1950. The most persuasive theory among food historians is that it emerged in Rome right at the end of the Second World War, and that it owes rather more to American army rations — the bacon and powdered egg that arrived with the Allied troops — than to any charcoal-burner who ever lived. The dish that feels like the deep peasant heritage of central Italy is younger than the jeep. It is younger, in fact, than most people's grandparents.

I did not say any of this to the man in Rome. But I have been thinking about it ever since, because carbonara is not an exception. It turns out that a startling number of the dishes we treat as immemorial — as the ancient, unchanging soul-food of a region — are, on inspection, astonishingly recent inventions wearing a very convincing costume.

Consider the croissant, and the story that everyone knows about it: that it was created in Vienna in 1683 to celebrate the defeat of the besieging Ottoman army, its crescent shape a little edible mockery of the crescent on the Turkish flag, so that every Viennese could symbolically devour the enemy at breakfast. It is a marvellous story. It is told in Vienna, in Paris, in guidebooks, in the backs of cereal boxes.

It is also, almost certainly, a complete fabrication. There is no contemporary evidence for it at all; it appears only in the late nineteenth century, comfortably two hundred years after the siege it claims to commemorate. The Austrian kipferl, a crescent-shaped roll, is genuinely old — but it is a plain bread roll, not the layered, laminated, butter-shattering pastry we mean by "croissant." That pastry is a French development, and a late one: the earliest French recipes for the properly laminated croissant date only to the very beginning of the twentieth century, around 1905 to 1915. The croissant you ate this morning is, in its actual form, roughly the same age as the aeroplane. The romantic siege of Vienna has simply been welded onto the front of it, because a pastry deserves a better birth certificate than "a Parisian baker worked out lamination sometime before the First World War."

My favourite case, though — the one that I think reveals the whole mechanism most clearly — is Swiss fondue.

Fondue feels eternal. It feels like the very definition of Alpine peasant food: the herdsmen in their wooden chalets, snowed in for the winter, melting the hard cheese and the stale bread that were all they had, gathering around the communal pot in a ritual older than the cantons themselves. And it is true that melted-cheese dishes existed in the Alpine regions of Switzerland and Savoy for a long time; you can find references to something fondue-shaped as far back as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

But fondue as the national dish of Switzerland — the thing every Swiss person eats, the symbol of the whole country, the pot around which the nation gathers — is essentially a marketing campaign. In the 1930s, and with real vigour after the war, the Swiss Cheese Union, the industry cartel that controlled the country's cheese production, set about promoting fondue as a patriotic duty. They pushed it into army kitchens and cookery classes and advertising. They coined cheerful slogans. They had every reason to want the Swiss eating as much melted cheese as possible, and they succeeded so completely that within a couple of generations the entire population had come to believe that dunking bread in a communal cheese pot was the ancestral heart of their identity, rather than something the dairy lobby had encouraged them to feel in living memory. The dish is old. The tradition — the meaning, the nationhood, the everyone-does-this — is a twentieth-century product, cheese sold with a story attached.

Once you start noticing this, you cannot stop, and Italy becomes a particularly rich hunting ground, because Italy is a country that only became a single nation in 1861 and has spent the time since energetically constructing the regional culinary heritage that a proper old country is supposed to already have.

Tiramisù, that supposedly timeless Italian classic, cannot be reliably traced back before the 1960s or 70s; it seems to have been invented in a restaurant in Treviso, in the Veneto, within the lifetime of people currently drawing a pension, and its origins are the subject of a lawsuit-adjacent argument between rival claimants that continues to this day. The Caprese salad — tomato, mozzarella, basil, the red-white-green of the Italian flag on a plate — appears to be an early-twentieth-century creation from Capri, and the patriotic tricolour framing that everyone now repeats may owe something to the nationalist enthusiasms of the years between the wars rather than to any deep folk tradition. Even the great founding legend of pizza — that the pizza Margherita was created in 1889 by a Naples pizzaiolo in honour of Queen Margherita of Savoy, with its colours chosen to match the flag — rests on a document whose authenticity serious scholars have openly questioned, and may be a piece of much later marketing dressed up as royal history.

And then there is fettuccine Alfredo, which is my preferred illustration of how these stories travel and mutate. There really was an Alfredo — Alfredo di Lelio, who ran a restaurant in Rome in the early twentieth century and made a dish of fresh fettuccine tossed vigorously with butter and parmesan. It is a real dish with a real inventor. But in Italy it barely exists as a named thing; it is just pasta al burro, pasta with butter, the plain nursery food you make for a child or an invalid. It became "Fettuccine Alfredo" only when two visiting Hollywood stars, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, ate it in Rome in the 1920s, loved it, and carried its fame back to America — where it then swelled, over the following decades, into the cream-drowned, garlic-laden, chicken-topped monument that appears on American restaurant menus and that no Roman would recognise as belonging to their city at all. The "authentic Italian classic" is, in its famous form, an American dish about an Italian dish, with an Italian man's name on it.

So why do we do this? Why does every food culture seem to need its dishes to be older, and more rooted, and more inevitable than they actually are?

The historian Eric Hobsbawm gave this whole phenomenon a name, in a book from 1983 called The Invention of Tradition — the observation that a great many of the customs we experience as ancient and unbroken are in fact quite recent, deliberately constructed, and then aged artificially, like a new table distressed to look like an heirloom. He was writing mostly about Scottish tartans and royal ceremonies, but food may be the purest example of the mechanism, because food is where a culture most wants to feel continuous. To eat the dish your ancestors ate is to touch them; to eat something a marketing board invented in 1952 is merely to have lunch. And so we quietly, collectively, backdate our favourite things. We give the charcoal-burners the carbonara. We give the pastry to the siege of Vienna. We hand the herdsmen their eternal fondue pot. Not out of dishonesty, exactly, but out of a deep human need for the food on the table to mean more than itself — to be not just dinner but inheritance.

There is nothing shameful in this, once you see it for what it is. A tradition does not have to be old to be real. Carbonara is a genuine, beloved, culturally central Roman dish whether it is eight hundred years old or eighty; the pleasure of it does not depend on the birth certificate. The döner shops and the currywurst stands that define a modern city are no less that city for having been invented within living memory. What matters is that people eat the thing, together, for long enough and with enough love that it becomes theirs. Age is just the story we drape over the top, afterwards, to make the belonging feel deeper.

I think about the man in Rome fairly often. I could, I suppose, have corrected him — could have mentioned the army rations and the 1950 newspaper and the conspicuous absence of any medieval charcoal-burner clutching a bowl of eggs. I am glad I didn't. He was not really telling me a fact about the twelfth century. He was telling me that this dish was his, and his city's, and his people's, and that it mattered — and about that, he was completely, unimpeachably right. The charcoal-burners were a decoration. The love was the tradition.

I ate the carbonara. It was extraordinary. It was, as far as I could tell, about as old as my father, and not one bit the worse for it.