Old Recipies

I made our favorite pasta on the anniversary of receiving the worst news of my life.

This scene from Tampopo is exactly how Rob and I separated eggs for the carbonara, actually.

I honestly cannot remember the last time I made pasta carbonara.

It was a weekly staple in our household. You can’t go wrong with a combination of pasta, cheese, eggs, and bacon. It was easy, it was fast, and it tasted good. And, most importantly, we were good at making it. 

I remember Rob, his family, and I once went to an Italian restaurant in Olean, a small city near Rob’s hometown in Western New York. It was trying to be fancier than anything else in the area, further emphasized by the fact that they charged New York City prices, which we found a little presumptuous. The food was Aggressively Fine, but nothing worth going out of our way to return to. One of us ordered the carbonara, and when it came out, Rob and I shared a look and muttered to each other about how ours was better. We brought this up occasionally in the years that followed, usually when we were in the kitchen making our carbonara, feeling smug.

Rob found the recipe in the New York Times cooking section—the original calls for guanciale, an Italian cured pork. Bacon was easier to find, but we always said we’d do it the proper way sometime, that we’d go to a butcher—maybe one of those old school ones run by no-nonsense Italian dudes in Cobble Hill, one that managed to survive the hostile takeover of stroller moms and yuppie dads. We never got around to it, and I didn’t this time either. I used regular old bacon like we always did. Equal parts parmesan and pecorino. Four eggs: two whole and two yolks. Spaghetti cooked al dente.¹ Top with chopped parsley for color and freshness, and reserve some of the pasta water to achieve a smoother texture.

I genuinely don’t know if I’ve made this since Rob died. I don’t cook as often as I used to, let alone cook our go-tos. I can’t even bring myself to make this one ragu Rob became obsessed with perfecting; he even bought a big fancy pot to prepare it in. He made that ragu so fucking often that sometimes I’d go, “Dude, please, can we not have ragu tonight?” and receive a crestfallen expression in return. I’d reverse course, insist that he can, in fact, make the ragu if he wants, that I’ll eat it and love it as usual. I’d give anything to have this exchange again, to eat that ragu I got so tired of again. I want to keep perfecting the recipe in his honor, but I can’t quite do it yet. I’m not ready. 

I wasn’t going to post anything about this. I wanted my next installment of Bad Brain to be Fun and focus on the fact that I hit 500 browser tabs on my phone again, or about how I’m contemplating a Skins rewatch, or about the financially stupid decisions I made in the last week to ensure that I can see Charli XCX on the Sweat Tour before it ends.

Instead, I spent most of the week thinking about how, on October 7, 2022, Rob told me that the doctors said there wasn’t much else that could be done to treat his cancer.