If you're Chef Renato Gualandi, you choose option B and create the (now) classic spaghetti alla carbonara.
Commonsense is matching the newness of your plan to the newness of your situation.
In Gualandi's situation, the situation wasn't drastically different. He was already accustomed to cooking for VIP guests and had the skill to do so well. What made the situation a little unusual was the addition of American ingredients and American VIPS.
So Gualandi matched the situation, not by doing anything too dramatic, but by making something a little different. He followed an Italian blueprint using American flavors.
Carbonara is made possible by a miracle of culinary technique— emulsion— familiar from traditional pasta recipes. Emulsion combines fat with a liquid it would normally repel to create a stable sauce. When done right, the heat and liquid starch from the carbonara pasta cooking water bind to the fat from the rendered bacon, egg yolks, and cheese to form a silky coating for the noodles.
Done wrong, you get bacon and eggs with wet noodles.
The very first recipe for spaghetti alla carbonara appears in a post-war American cookbook, followed almost immediately after by inclusion in an Italian cookbook and the British food writer Elizabeth David's Italian Food.
This “classic” is really a modern-day fusion dish, borne from war, commonsense, and good culinary training.
Sarah can't imagine life without
it, extra black pepper (the
carbon) please.
