Heinz sparks anger in Italy with canned spaghetti carbonara

LETTER FROM ITALY

Carbonara is no joke. Often the subject of outrageous indignation on the part of Italians most sensitive to culinary patriotism, the disastrous tendency of foreigners to re-appropriate the Roman recipe for their own sauces has once again caused a scandal in the Peninsula. On Thursday, August 29, the American food company Heinz, famous for its ketchup and its baked beans, announced on its British X and Instagram accounts the launch in September of a new product in the United Kingdom: spaghetti carbonara in a can at 1.75 pounds sterling (2.08 euros) each. The container of course evokes for some an industrial nightmare contrary to the imagination of a traditional dish requiring a certain skill in the harmonious assembly of a few carefully chosen ingredients.

The official recipe for the carbonara pasta does not, in fact, include anything other than egg yolk, pecorino, a sheep’s milk cheese, and, under a turn of the pepper mill, slices of dried pig’s cheeks, guanciale, preserved in their fat. However, in addition to canning them, Heinz imposes on its spaghetti the always controversial and considered degrading proximity of cream. And, what is perhaps more serious, the manufacturer even replaces the guanciale with pancetta, a charcuterie prepared with pork belly. Nothing to do, therefore, with the carbonara of the Romans.

“It’s time for a no-fuss, no-drama carbonara.”, proclaimed Heinz’s communicators in their posts on social networks. Really? Was it just a question of praising the merits of a preparation that is easy to heat up in the microwave, almost ready to eat? Or was it a question of mocking in advance the reactions that the launch of the product would not fail to provoke in Italy?

A “horrible idea”

These, in any case, have made themselves heard. Notably by the voice of the chef, a regular on television sets, Gianfranco Vissani, who, questioned by the press agency Adnkronos, thought it was a good idea to thunder, threateningly, to Heinz: “I would tell them to go to hell, with these proposals they are destroying Italian culture and our cuisine. They should be ashamed.” For the gourmet, “With these initiatives, companies are trying to innovate for themselves, (…) “There is nothing that represents Italy beyond the name”.

Still at Adnkronos, the Italian chef Cristina Bowerman, of the Hosteria Glass (one Michelin star), in Rome, denounced, for her part, a “bastardization of [la] cuisine [italienne] ». For her, it is a “horrible idea”because, according to the cook, “The risk is that consumers will try this canned version before the original, and may even be disappointed.”. M^me Bowerman adds that « Only knowledge of Italian cuisine allows us to understand that this product cannot represent the original recipe”.

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