In 1974, my cooking was largely limited to cornflakes and boxed mac and cheese. Barbara knew her way around a kitchen. I knew my way to the table.
That began to change when we were invited to dinner at the home of Vanni and Sylvia in Bernex, near the French border and a short drive from Petit-Lancy, where Vanni and I worked for Digital Equipment Corporation. Vanni had been born and raised in Milan, and that evening he was the chef.
Dinner was carbonara.
It was an amazingly simple dish, rich but not heavy, with more flavor than seemed possible from so few ingredients. It was also nothing like the gloppy pasta with cream, peas and scraps of ham that many American restaurants would later call carbonara.
Vanni made his with bucatini, egg yolks, bacon, Parmesan, black pepper and a little nutmeg. No cream. It didn’t need any.
Bucatini is essentially fat spaghetti with a tiny hole running through the center—long, skinny macaroni. The sauce coats the outside and finds its way into the hollow middle, giving it plenty of places to cling.
Vanni showed me what he was doing, and I wrote the recipe on the back page of a paperback copy of The Joy of Cooking. I still have it. The paper is stained and torn, the handwriting fades from black to blue, and several words have been crossed out or changed.
Across the top are the words: Spaghetti Carbonara alla Vanni.