Why do so many people abroad love to destroy traditional Italian recipes by cooking horror movie dishes?

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Italians are, for the most part, horrible at articulating why they do things the way they do. And honestly, people wouldn’t listen to them anyway.

Italian cuisine is almost as finicky as baking is. If you go get some guanciale from the butcher and it’s not quite as fatty as it needs to be, then it won’t render enough fat. Meaning you need to add olive oil so your sauce is rich enough. It won’t be as good as if all the fat is that incredibly delicious jowl render. But if the sauce doesn’t emulsify enough fat then there’s just no point, and you should just make something else with your incredibly expensive imported ingredients. Properly made Italian dishes are absolutely magical.

It’s such not a terrible faux pas to not get your ingredients from Italy. Guanciale is guanciale, it’s herbed, cured, unsmoked pork jowl. You can’t get that from just anywhere, Americans just won’t buy unsmoked bacon for some dumb reason. you need somewhere that actually understands how to make that magic. It doesn’t have to be Italy. Pancetta is similar but it’s from the belly. The quality of the fat isn’t as good. But don’t use American-style bacon. The smoke gets in the way.

If you don’t have the right ingredients, then you need to balance the flavors. There’s a great book on this, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. I once made what I call a “redneck carbonara” once, with an American-style grana cheese, the same family of cheese as Parmigiano-Reggiano and Pecorino Romano, eggs, and American bacon. I added left over roast chicken. It wasn’t bad, and a heck of a lot cheaper than using imported cheese and jowl bacon. But real Carbonara is just much much better.

The way I would put it is, if you want to make a pasta dish with just cheese, pasta, and pepper, how good do you think it would be if it were preground black pepper and American cheese? It would be terrible!! You can absolutely make a decent cheese sauce with American cheese, but not with just black pepper! I’d use a good spice mix to compensate for the blandness of the cheese, add eggs for creaminess, or maybe make a quick roux. I’d just call it cheesy pasta.

But if you use a good Pecorino and toast good peppercorns before grinding them fresh, don’t forget proper noodles with the starch on the outside, then the cacio e pepe you make with it will be amazing! With just two ingredients! What makes Italian food so great is that they spent thousands of years refining and perfecting their local ingredients. And then came up with dishes that perfectly showcase those refined ingredients. You don’t see anyone adding salt to Roman pasta dishes, because the cheese and meat have the perfect amount of salt in them.

I’m not Italian, I’m Cajun. Our ancestry is French. French cuisine is more technique-focused rather than ingredient-focused. You won’t find much use of roux in Italian food. French cheese for the most part is softer, it won’t hold up in sauces very well, so they use roux to thicken sauce rather than cheese and starchy pasta water. French people came up with their own dishes to showcase their unique ingredients. Unless you really just want to experiment, why butcher Italian cuisine with ingredients that just won’t make the magic?