The French pseudo-carbonara that has provoked outrage in Italy is merely one episode in a larger pasta revolution sweeping Europe and America. Photograph by Simon Reddy / Alamy

Last week, a French food Web site, having sold a piece of its soul to the Italian pasta manufacturer Barilla, put out a jaunty little video showing the creation of a French-style carbonara. It was made with bowtie noodles (technically, farfalle; your mother called them bowtie noodles), chopped onion, and cubed bacon, all dropped together into a pan and simmered with a small amount of water for a short time over low heat. An unseen hand then adds some crème fraîche and some unspecified cheese and pepper, then mixes it all together, garnishes it with a raw egg yolk and sprigs of parsley, and there you have—or, rather, don’t have—a pasta carbonara. Italian hands were wrung, someone in Italy complained to someone in the E.U. or the like, and the food blog actually deleted the video. But the damage was done; a French insult had been perpetrated on an Italian dish.

The Great Carbonara Crisis—or Carbonaragate, as it’s come to be known—has arrived at an oddly opportune moment for my family. We have just come back from a sort of impromptu carciofi and carbonara festival in Rome. I was there for the publication of an Italian translation of a Canadian book and, while officially pretending to be caught up in Gibbonian gloom, the truth is that we were enjoying dinner after delicious dinner at a variety of Roman trattorias, where the menu unvaryingly started off with artichokes and then moved on to bucatini carbonara.

The carciofi, or artichokes, were, to put it technically, awesome—but I will confess that I had already, even pre-crisis, some scruples about the carbonara. I am well aware that the matchless Calvin Trillin proposed spaghetti carbonara as the American national dish, and I am reluctant to tangle with the Gourmand of Grove Place on any issue of the table. But the truth is that a week eating carbonaras in Rome reminds you that the dish is actually something of a tourist trap for the taste buds. For one thing, prime carbonara in Rome is made with eggs whose mothers have been fed a special diet to make their yolks more orange; this lovely local touch has, for an American eater, the odd effect of making an authentic plate of the pasta look eerily like the boxed Kraft macaroni and cheese your grandmother used to make.

My real objection, though, is that, compared with the other Roman pasta standby, cacio e pepe, the balance of ingredients in carbonara seems heavier than the modern palate demands. I like it fine, but I don’t like it to distraction, while the arguments about whether it should be made with pancetta or guanciale or bacon always remind me of the arguments about whether you can have a true cassoulet made with anything but tarbais beans, or if you can have a bouillabaisse without rascasse, the strange Mediterranean fish. The simple truth, whispered around the local tables but not permitted to be said out loud, is that all of these dishes, rooted in the peasant cooking of their provinces, are there to be improvised according to what’s there, not executed according to a plan from what’s written. Carbonara is, at its best, an instance of that other Italian invention, arte povera: it’s made with what’s in the fridge when nothing else is in the fridge, and, like all good dishes, blossoms in a context of inconvenience. Like rice and beans, it tastes best when made impromptu in the absence of anything else. “Look what you can do with so little!” is its true theme. (Some do say that carbonara was at first an American soldier’s dish, made with the eggs and bacon the G.I.s brought to Italy during the Second World War. But by now it’s a cupboard classic.)

As political pundits like to say, what is really missing from the Great Carbonara Crisis is the larger context. What up-to-date American viewers of the video will immediately recognize is that this new approach, legit or not, reflects a revolution that has already swept through American kitchens: it is part of the larger Problem of the One-Pot Pasta. I reference the intrusion, and then explosion, of a dubious-looking but actually astonishingly successful recipe, with apparent Italian origins, for a one-pot tomato pasta made not by carefully preparing an onion–and-tomato sauce and then mixing it with pasta cooked in a pasta pot, as we have been taught to do, but simply by putting everything in one saucepan, raw, with a little bit of water, and cooking it all together.

This recipe, forensic investigation has shown, began as an incident on a Martha Stewart television episode, then spread to the Martha Stewart Web site, only to be re-instantiated on the ever-popular Food52, which called it no less than “The one-pan pasta that took over the Internet (and changed the way we think about cooking pasta).” It makes a mockery of all the careful tomato simmering and onion sautéing that we have been doing for years, and looks, at least, like an eight-year-old’s idea of cooking: you just put everything in one pot, simmer, and stir.

Unfortunately, it works. It works extremely well. What once took half an hour—between the sauce, the big pot of pasta water, and cooking the pasta itself—is now available in nine minutes, maybe ten if you throw in an extra minute for halving the tomatoes and slicing the onions. The small amount of water, which runs against everything we had learned from Marcella Hazan, actually increases the starchiness of the sauce, making its own delicious and easily worked binding. Food52 and elsewhere have even proposed trying this idea with other ingredients: broccoli and sausage, or the like. Basically, the laborious techniques we learned at length can now be duplicated with non-techniques that anyone can learn in thirty seconds.

The “French” pseudo-carbonara, in other words, is merely one episode in a larger pasta revolution that is sweeping Europe and America. Deleting a single video can’t contain the problem—or hold off its triumph. And what the Italians really object to is what many American diners and cooks who have been served the other one-pot pasta have objected to: it seems somehow to traduce the spirit of the thing. There is, in the kind of simple working-people’s cooking that carbonara represents, an accompanying sense that it has to be done just so or it isn’t good at all. The chef Sara Jenkins, in a blog post, for instance, worries her way through a cacio e pepe recipe, feeling that the introduction of butter is verboten, while struggling to get the right formula of pasta-pot water and olive oil and cheese—when do you put in the cheese, and what cheese do you use, and do you grind the pepper in late or early?

In other words, we love and relish our faith that simple dishes take complex mastery. That is, if anything, the core belief of all good cooks, the first thing the master cooks teach us. “A whatever-it-is may look simple, but in truth it requires . . .” is how this formula runs in every recipe book and in every cooking class, and it reinforces the guild consciousness of cooks. If in truth exactly the same dish with the same flavor can be produced by a blindfolded child, then a crucial sustaining myth of the kitchen will fly with it.

In other words, this is not a carbonara crisis. It is a credentialism crisis. It transcends borders, and cuisines, and speaks to a larger crisis of which pseudo-carbonara is only a mediocre instance. If it turns out that what we can do can be done by anyone, what will we do then? Such crises of credentials, of course, have already struck many fields, from travel agents to, well, magazine writers. Can we endure one more?