A recipe for Kate's spaghetti carbonara a la Danny
There’s something about a recipe that includes its maker’s name in the title that makes it feel a lot more special. My attention certainly perks up—what does this person know that no one else does? Often, probably not much, but it adds the feeling that the person it was named after had some secret weapon worthy of getting credit for it.
Though he named it after himself, Danny’s Spaghetti Carbonara is a dish that I can’t really say seems that different than any other carbonara—which has gotten a lot of play on the newsletter circuit recently, for whatever reason. It’s an aggressively uncomplicated pasta. I remember not loving it as a child, save for the bacon, which I scarfed up with excitement (but take that opinion with several strands of linguini, because for much of my early life, pasta with tomato sauce was all I really wanted).
(Another way I loved bacon: a bacon and grilled cheese sandwich when it was summer, mom was traveling, and the adult in the room was having a B.L.T. Pure luxury. Taken too far: bacon on a cheeseburger, which I used to try to stomach and now have simply acknowledged makes me sick.)
The more recent issue with carbonara is that I rarely have milk or cream in the house, because it spoils very quickly and food going bad drives me crazy. This time, when I decided to make carbonara because, coincidentally enough, with its short ingredient list, it is the perfect thing to make if indeed you don’t have food in the house, I had the same issue. But I was not to be deterred! Any lazy person knows you can use butter and more cheese and even Greek yogurt in a pinch in these mac and cheese-esque pasta situations, and I was fine doing that, particularly because there’s plenty of debate about whether it’s traditional to include cream in the first place.
As I was cooking for one, I casually cut the whole thing down to somewhere around a 1/4 of the recipe size—I guess I could have made more and had some beloved leftovers but for once couldn’t focus on that. I sliced the garlic instead of mincing as I think this recipe probably intended for me to, and used a whole egg instead of yolks. The bacon I could have cut smaller, but when you’re in a rush to eat, who has the time.
I didn’t empty the bacon grease either—it really wasn’t much—and then swiftly added the parm and butter, which worked really nicely in place of milk or cream, especially with a dash of pasta water. One last thought: I threw in a handful of arugula, which I would have hated as a child but now felt like a dash of peppery health. It was honestly incredible, but whether that was because of me or Danny or the original inventor of carbonara or the fact that I was very hungry is anyone’s guess. We will probably never know.
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