Carbonara, 1939, Batavia
A national myth fell over on a single newspaper archive. The historians changed their minds within a day.
Carbonara, 1939, Batavia
A national myth fell over on a single newspaper archive. The historians changed their minds within a day.
Five days after I wrote about Luciano's carbonara, it was in the paper: the dish is older than anyone thought, and the proof was found in the Dutch East Indies.
The accepted theory was uncomfortable for Rome. Carbonara was supposed to have been born in 1944, when American soldiers handed their bacon-and-egg rations to Roman cooks. An American breakfast with pasta stirred through it. Alberto Grandi, the food historian who in 2024 set a whole country against him with the claim that Italian cuisine does not exist, defended that reading most fiercely.
Then an NRC reader searching Delpher, the Dutch digital newspaper archive, found a column in De Koerier of 23 August 1939. Batavia. The correspondent Norah Berkhuijsen describes a summer evening on the Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere, two trattorias alike in everything but their speciality. One serves risotto with prawns. The other: spaghetti alla carbonara.
Nine years before the oldest Italian mention. Five years before the Americans.
What fascinates me is not the dish but what happened next. Vreugdenhil sent the article to Grandi. No defence, no footnote about unreliable sources. Within two hours a reply that let go of his own thesis and called the document a small revolution. That same day he forwarded it to Luca Cesari, Italy's foremost carbonara authority and likewise a believer in the American theory. He bowed too. A week later it was in Gambero Rosso.
That is how knowledge is supposed to work and almost never does. Two men with a reputation staked on a claim, and a newspaper clipping by a Dutch woman from 1939 is enough for them to hand that claim in.
There is another lesson in it. The evidence for a Roman dish did not survive in Rome. It survived in a colonial newspaper on the other side of the world, because someone took the trouble to write down a summer evening. Heritage is not what is preserved in the country of origin. It is what was noted down somewhere, by whoever, and what someone later finds again.
Four ingredients. And now a date as well.
Sources: Janneke Vreugdenhil, "Pasta carbonara blijkt tóch Italiaans", NRC, 7 February 2026; Norah Berkhuijsen, "Menschen en Dingen van Rome", De Koerier (Batavia), 23 August 1939, via Delpher; Alberto Grandi, La cucina italiana non esiste (Mondadori, 2024).
Source: Based on: Janneke Vreugdenhil — 'Een kleine revolutie en goed nieuws voor de Romeinen: pasta carbonara blijkt tóch Italiaans', NRC, 7 February 2026; Alberto Grandi, La cucina italiana non esiste (Mondadori, 2024)