In my mind, no dish better encapsulates the experience of Roman cuisine than Spaghetti alla Carbonara — the Roman charcoal industry’s gift to the world. As the story I’ve been told goes, the charcoal sellers lived in the towns in the hills of Lazio outside Rome, cutting wood and charring it before carrying it in sacks down to the city to sell. The work was almost unbearably physical, and demanded hearty food to keep up one’s energy — hence, the birth of this almost unbearably rich pasta dish.

How much of that is truth and how much the product of the Roman love for poetic fabrication I don’t know, but whatever its history, it’s my favorite meal on Earth, a marker of important events in the same way that others use champagne or cigars. When served, conversation around the table ceases, replaced by moans and grunting. It’s a pleasure too good to ever be called guilty.

A note on ingredients: I call for pancetta, an air-cured Italian pork belly that’s a cousin to bacon. I love its chewy sweet-saltiness, but most Romans would insist that you use guanciale, cured pork cheek, whose soft, buttery unctuousness produces a different texture and effect. Pancetta is widely available, usually presliced in thin sheet; I prefer to buy it from an artisan salumi producer that sells it in a cylindrical roll that allows me to cut it into small dice. Guanciale is less widely available. Both can be bought online from Boccalone, a San Francisco artisan salumeria, and in well-stocked Italian markets.

Also, this recipe uses minimally cooked eggs. All the usual caveats apply; I recommend sourcing eggs from responsible producers that are unlikely to have salmonella problems, but if you’re worried about uncooked eggs, this may not be the recipe for you.

Spaghetti alla Carbonara

*Mise en place is essential for this recipe. Have everything prepared before you start!

Still, some of the things nearest and dearest to our hearts and stomachs are not to be spoken of in the presence of respectable people — and the element of danger only increases their appeal. You’ll have to pry our pork belly sliders from our cold, dead (no doubt from congestive heart failure) hands.

Even Mom, the most vocal worrywart in the family, is not immune to the allure of fatty treats. Every so often over the years, she’d wax rhapsodic about the baroque, egg-laden Portuguese sweets she grew up with in Macau, which was at that time a Portuguese protectorate. I was intrigued by her descriptions of them and by the fact that none of these treats seemed to have a name, at least not that she could remember. One of these, she said, consisted of “tiny strands of egg yolk cooked in sugar, like a little birds’ nest”; another was “a ball of egg yolk that has crunchy sugar on the outside but is creamy when you bite into it”. How could these mysterious wonders not have names?

Later, my curiosity grew with the realization that I’d never seen anything resembling those confections anywhere — and I’ve been fortunate enough to live in places where one can track down just about any ethnic cuisine imaginable. Another reason for my fascination with those treats is that they are made almost entirely of egg yolks. Eggs in themselves, Mom liked to warn, should be eaten only in moderation. But the mystery sweets of her youth not only contained eggs, but only the bad, dangerous, cholesterol-bearing part of the egg, in lethal concentrations. And yet Mom liked to reminisce about those eggy sweets, and would no doubt eat one in a heartbeat if we somehow managed to conjure them up.

Then, last week, she called me, excited by a recent discovery. While browsing an online store featuring Spanish imports, she came across something that looked strikingly familiar — tiny, round convent sweets made of egg yolks, an artisanal specialty made for hundreds of years by an order of Spanish nuns in the walled medieval town of Avila. The description said they were crunchy with sugar on the outside with insides that dissolved on the tongue “without any pressure.”

Bingo. Or as close to “bingo” as we could hope to get: Spain and Portugal are neighboring countries with many shared food traditions, including an obsession with cramming as many egg yolks as possible into the dessert course. (There is a practical historical reason for this: Wine-makers in both countries required large quantities of egg whites to clarify wine, and the nuns used egg whites to starch their habits; hence, a steady supply of egg yolks was ready and waiting to be made into convent sweets.) The resulting cholesterol bombs became so beloved they spread around the world with the Spanish and Portuguese diaspora, evolving as they traveled. Local variants of Iberian egg sweets can be found in locales as far flung as the Philippines, Brazil — and Macau.

And Mom swore those pricey Spanish sweets from that online catalogue looked and sounded exactly like the ones she remembered from Macau. But no way was she going to pay to have those things airlifted in an insulated box from Spain to Los Angeles.

But, she said hopefully, there were recipes for it online, and they sounded pretty simple. I had myself a project.

The recipes I found for this confection, officially called yemas de Santa Teresa (literally “Saint Teresa’s egg yolks,” aka “the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems”), all take the same basic form: make a sugar syrup, mix it with an appalling number of egg yolks, cool the resulting mixture, form it into little balls, then roll the balls in sugar. Some recipes boast only three ingredients: egg yolks, sugar and water. Others enhance the syrup with lemon zest and/or cinnamon. I like the idea of a hit of spice and citrus to offset all that sweetness and richness; it adds to the mysterious medieval vibe of the confections and makes them feel both more and less pointlessly decadent.

I’ve always hated the term “sinful” when applied to food. It seems to reflect the worst aspects of Puritanism (free will and the Puritan work ethic I can get behind; the idea that life must be miserable to be virtuous, not so much). Besides, how could these little treats be sinful? They were invented by nuns. And sold by nuns to support their work. Ergo, those who eat them are doing God’s work.

Given these truths, how could they possibly be bad for you?

The following recipe is a combination of several nearly identical recipes I found online from different sources. Almost all of the credible-looking recipes came from websites based in Spain, which made me glad to have functional Spanish reading skills and a digital scale that allows metric measurements. I’ve converted the measurements to standard American measures.

YEMAS DE SANTA TERESA

Malasadas are the yeasty, eggy, sugary doughnuts that were introduced to the Hawaiian islands by Portuguese immigrants from the Azores generations ago. Eagerly incorporated into the cuisine of the Hawaiian islands, each island has a “best” place to get them. On the Big Island, that place is Tex Drive In, in Honokaa, near Waimea.

To the casual observer, the malasada looks like a typical raised doughnut, rolled in granulated sugar. Stace, one of the kama’aina (locals) I talked to, shed some light on what makes Tex’s malasada special: the first owners converted their recipe for pao doce (Portuguese sweet bread) and used it to make their mouth-watering and award-winning malasadas.

My husband arrived back with the box of malasadas just as the rest of us were waking up, and we quickly devoured them. That’s how you can eat on vacation — without consequences.

Back home, I wanted to make a Sunday brunch to remind us of Hawaii, which we miss too much already, but I don’t do much deep-frying in my kitchen. Thinking back to Stace, Tex’s malasadas, and the Portuguese immigrants who brought their sweet bread and malasadas to another heavenly island home, I made a not-too-guilty replacement: Portuguese sweet bread French toast with coconut syrup.

Portuguese-Hawaiian sweet bread French toast with coconut syrup

Sweet bread makes excellent French toast because of its eggy, light and slightly chewy texture. I made this version with guava- and taro-flavored sweet bread we brought back with us from Punalu’u Bake Shop, which by being located 30 minutes South of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park in Na’alehu is known as the “Southernmost Bakery in the U.S.A.” King’s Hawaiian bread or rolls, readily available in all major grocers on the mainland, make a great substitution. Hawaiian coconut syrup is more difficult to come by, so I’ve made a recipe you can make from ingredients easily found anywhere.

Spaghetti alla carbonara by Charlie Lawton: Forget all the leaden, creamy, faker versions of this classic Roman dish. Here it is, in its original form: just good pasta, cured pork, eggs and cheese, food that will make you moan and then pass out.

THIS WEEK’S ALTERNATE WINNERS:

Pakoras — Indian vegetable fritters by Anjali Joshi: Light, crisp and beguilingly spiced, Anjali shares a favorite taste from her Delhi youth, when pakoras were about the only thing that could lure her back indoors at the start of the monsoon season.

Cauliflower and prosciutto gratin by Launie Kettler: What do you do when you find beautiful fresh cauliflower? Well, if you’re a writer whose bio reads, “A native Vermonter who finds nature abhorrent,” you might douse it in creamy cheese sauce with pork products and bake it all into brown, toasty, tasty submission.

Hawaiian sweet bread French toast with coconut syrup by Linda Shiue: For food lovers, no trip to Hawaii is complete without malasadas, local doughnuts by way of Portuguese immigrants. But coming home, where plain old doughnuts rule, Linda took inspiration from a conversation she had with a malasada maker to create her own sweet, bready treat.

Yemas de Santa Teresa (aka, more egg yolks than you can imagine) by Felicia Lee: A hilarious story of family, cholesterol, colonialism, cholesterol and traditional Spanish and Portuguese sweets that consist of, basically, sugared cholesterol.

PLUS, ALSO, TOO: THE HONORABLE MENTIONS

Chocolate cheesecake with caramel, ganache and almonds by Brandi Jo Plaster: What is left to say?

“Scrapolini” — pasta with butter and crispy garlic by Rebecca Farwell: “Go from soggy-footed entry to comfy couch (TV remote in one hand, glass of red wine in the other) in about 15 minutes.”

Praline candied bacon by Theresa Rice/Lisa Barlow: In a story that involves the Sweet Potato Queen, a book titled “The Sweet Potato Queens’ Big-Ass Cookbook and Financial Planner,” and a woman named Patty Leathers, it’s almost inevitable that the recipe that comes at the end of it is candied bacon, right? And for ideas on what to do with this stuff, check out Lisa Barlow’s “Elvis Sandwich” and, perversity of perversities, a candied bacon salad.

The accidental amazing carrot cake by Dawn E. Bell: What happens when a baker accidentally drops five cups of powdered sugar into a carrot cake batter? Well, apparently, an unbelievably caramelized crust and a flavor “like sugared spice.” We are a little too worried about our insulin to attempt such a feat, but you might be braver!

Five-minute chocolate cake by Horns of a Dilemma: A classic of Internet recipe sharers, here it is, ladies and gents: “The Most Dangerous Recipe in the World,” the chocolate cake that takes five minutes to make. (Not saying it’s the best, but, hey: five minutes.)

Sticky toffee pudding by The Angry Chef: Here is a proper sticky toffee pudding, written by a chef in England. Isn’t the value in this self-evident?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

AND NOW FOR … an announcement

Cue the old-timey TV voice, because we’ve got something we have to say: This concludes our regularly scheduled SKC programming.

But before the waterworks start, we’d like to say something else, that that something is this: 68. That’s how many Salon Kitchen Challenges there have been, how many weeks you have shared your stories, jokes, pictures, slices of life and — of course — recipes to the thousands of readers and fans of the challenge. We tip our hats to you, to those who gave it a shot once, and to those who have shared dozens and dozens of times. Your tireless writing and cooking and storytelling are amazing. Thank you so, so much for making this little contest so fun, enlightening, touching and delicious … even though no one ever took us up on submitting mashed potato sculpture for their entry. 

So we hope, even without the Salon Kitchen Challenge, you’ll keep blogging on Open Salon, sharing with your many fans. They’ll be there, reading, chatting and cooking.