“You probably think I do this for everybody,” Meryl Streep, as Rachel, says to Jack Nicholson’s Mark in the 1986 film Heartburn, after cooking up a late-night carbonara. We can’t all be Meryl Streep, but you can whip up a mean pasta with this foolproof recipe from Ian Fisher, which calls for pecorino and parmesan, egg yolks and whole eggs, and olive oil-fried guanciale, which permeates the dish with its irresistible porkiness.

This dish is a deli egg-bacon-and-cheese-on-a-roll that has been pasta-fied, fancified, fetishised and turned into an Italian tradition that, like many inviolate Italian traditions, is actually far less old than the Mayflower. Because America may have contributed to its creation, carbonara is Exhibit A in the back-and-forth between Italy and the United States when i

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