Controversy breaks out over butter in cacio e pepe recipe.
A recipe for cacio e pepe on the prominent UK culinary website Good Food has sparked an outcry in Italy over the inclusion of a controversial fourth ingredient: butter.
The recipe on the website, until recently known as BBC Good Food and still operating under the web address bbcgoodfood.com, also includes the option of using parmesan (parmigiano) instead of pecorino.
The traditional recipe for the dish, a staple of Roman cuisine, famously has only three ingredients: pasta (spaghetti or tonnarelli), pecorino Romano cheese and black pepper.
The UK version of the recipe prompted Italy’s small and medium-sized business association, Confesercenti, to raise the issue with the British embassy in Rome on Wednesday.
Claudio Pica, head of the Rome and Lazio branch of Confesercenti, said the association had been “astonished” to learn of the mistaken recipe and demanded that it be corrected to “safeguard the popular and iconic dish”.
“The original recipe for cacio e pepe excludes the use of parmigiano and butter” – Pica underlined – “There are not four ingredients, but three: pasta, pepper, and pecorino.”
As of Thursday morning, the Good Food recipe for cacio e pepe still listed “25g butter”.
Meanwhile a recipe for “trendy” cacio e pepe in the Food section of the BBC website includes the three traditional ingredients along with the contentious suggestion that those struggling with the dish could “try adding a slick of double cream to the mix”.
It is not the first time that foreign takes on Italian recipes have sparked fury in Italy, usually relating to another Roman classic: carbonara.
In 2020 Romans reeled in horror at celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay’s “nightmare carbonara” while in 2021 The New York Times caused upset in Italy with its Smoky Tomato Carbonara.
