Italy: Fettuccine all'Alfredo (Fettuccine with Butter and Parmesan)

Among pasta dishes, fettuccine all'Alfredo is possibly unique in the folklore it has gathered around itself. A century along in its development, it's hard to know for sure whether its success was more due to spontaneous reactions from the people who first ate it, or inspired marketing by its inventor.

The legend (as seen on the web page of the restaurant owned by the inventor's descendants) goes like this: Once upon a time (all right, 1914), Alfredo di Lelio worked in his parents' little restaurant. He married a lovely girl who eventually became pregnant with their first child: and when she did, she lost her appetite completely. Alfredo was worried about his wife, and tried for a long time to come up with something that would tempt her palate.

Finally Alfredo made up a batch of a light semolina pasta -- lighter than a plain flour pasta -- and dressed it with nothing but butter and a little Parmigiana-Reggiano cheese. (Here the story as presented on the website takes an inadvertently humorous turn: "When the dish was ready... he brought it to his wife, saying: "If you don't want it, I will eat it!!!" Well, why waste?) Anyway, Mrs. Alfredo (no amount of searching has so far turned up her name -- which just seems wrong, somehow: without her, where would Alfredo's descendants be now?) loved the dish, and gobbled it up.

Alfredo began offering his new pasta dish in the restaurant, where it became a huge hit. And eventually he went on to open his own restaurant, where famous people from all over the world came to eat his wonderful pasta. The movie stars Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford came too, on their honeymoon, and were so impressed by Alfredo's pasta that they gave him a golden fork and spoon engraved with the words, "The King of Fettucine." And Alfredo became famous all over the world, and lived (we must assume) happily ever after. Certainly his grandson (Alfredo the Third) still presides over the restaurant his father started, and wields the Golden Fork and Spoon with his own hands, and licenses his name all over the place, in distant locales like São Paulo, Mexico City, New York, and Disney World.

It's a lovely story. As usual with fairy tales, though, the truth gets somewhat buried under the archetypes. A former correspondent for the New York Times visited Alfredo II's restaurant in the 1950's and reports some unsettling things: that the recipe wasn't original with Alfredo, that it was all over the place under the names fettuccine alla Romana or fettucine alla burro, and that the only thing Alfredo had done differently was to triple the butter. Later it turned out that there were now two sets of the Golden Fork and Spoon, each claiming to be the original -- one set at Alfredo's old place at 104 via della Scrofa (sold on when he retired, still operating and actively marketing and franchising itself) and one at his new place at 30 Piazza Augusto Imperatore (which Alfredo opened at the instigation of businessmen who thought he should market the dish more widely, in conjunction with Italy's Holy Year in 1950). Other food writers suggest that hardly anyone in Italy (except restaurateurs with their eye on the tourist trade) would recognize the dish by the name fettuccine Alfredo or pasta Alfredo. Ordinary Italians generally don't even recognize this simple treatment as a "dish", but more the kind of thing that a tired mom would plunk down in front of the kids at the end of the day.

At any rate, no culinary legend survives contact with the cooking world for long. The recipe unquestionably became famous: and as soon as that happened, people started messing around with it. It is now hard to find any place serving fettuccine all'Alfredo that does it according to Alfredo I's original recipe -- excepting, of course, his own restaurants. Cream and sometimes even egg yolks have snuck into the recipe somewhere along the line, not to mention peculiar additives like cream cheese, cottage cheese, and other ingredients meant to thicken the sauce less expensively than with that fancy cheese and all that butter. In particular, there are now many people who would not recognize the dish or acknowledge it as fettuccine all'Alfredo if the cream wasn't there. (Ask the manager at Alfredo's of Rome in New York: "You can tell them five times there's no cream. They won't believe you.")

So we're offering two versions of the recipe: the original (as revealed by the chef of his New York restaurant) and the simplest version containing cream. Our thought, though, is that the original recipe is probably the best -- and if you make it with good enough pasta, cheese and butter, even the Golden Fork and Spoon probably wouldn't make a difference one way or another.

Click on "read more" for the recipes.

The original recipe:

• 1 lb. of fresh, thin fettuccine

• 6 oz. unsalted butter
• 6 oz. Parmigiano Reggiano cheese (aged 24 months), grated

Bring the butter to room temperature. Blend it with the grated cheese in a bowl (or in the small bowl of a food processor if you prefer) until the cheese almost vanishes into the butter: usually this takes two or three minutes. The effect should be that of a smooth, thick cream. Cook the fettuccine noodles in lots of salted boiling water for three minutes. Strain the pasta, leaving it just a little wet, and toss the noodles with the sauce. Serve in pasta bowls. Add some more grated Parmigiano if you like.

The version of the recipe that contains cream:

MMMMM----- Recipe via Meal-Master (tm) v7.01
 
     Title: Fettuccine With Butter & Cream - Fettuccine All'alfredo
Categories: Italian, Pasta, Main dish
  Servings:  6
 
           Basic egg pasta dough *
    1/4 c  Butter
      1 c  Whipping cream
           Salt
           White pepper
    1/4 c  Fresh grated Parmesan cheese
           Additional Parmesan cheese
 
  Prepare noodles using Basic Egg Pasta Dough (made with 2-1/4 cup
  all-purpose flour)
  Melt butter in a large skillet.  When butter foams, add cream.  Simmer
  over medium heat about 2 minutes until slightly thickened.  Season with
  salt and white pepper.  Fill a very large saucepan two-thirds full with
  salted water.  Bring water to a boil.  Add noodles.  Bring water back to a
  boil and cook noodles uncovered until tender, but firm to bite.  Drain
  noodles and place in skillet with cream.  Add 1/4 cup Parmesan cheese.
  Toss noodles and sauce over medium heat until sauce coats noodles, 20 to
  30 seconds.  Serve immediately with additional Parmesan cheese.  Makes 4
  to 6 servings.
 
MMMMM

MMMMM----- Recipe via Meal-Master (tm) v8.05
 
      Title: Basic Egg Pasta Dough
 Categories: Pasta
      Yield: 8 Servings
 
  4 1/2 c  All-purpose flour
      6    Eggs
 
  Recipe by: Northern Italian Cooking Put flour on a pastry board and
  make a well in the center. Break the eggs into well; beat with a
  fork. Draw some flour from inner rim of well over eggs, beating
  constantly. Keep adding flour a little at a time until you have a
  soft dough. Put dough aside. With a pastry scraper, remove bits and
  pieces of dough attached to board. Lightly flour board and your
  hands. Knead dough 10 to 12 minutes, adding flour a little at a time
  until dough is smooth and pliable. Insert a finger into center of
  dough.  If it comes out almost dry, dough is ready for pasta machine.
  If dough is sticky, knead it a little longer adding more flour. Cut
  an egg-size piece from dough.  Wrap remaining dough in a cloth towel
  to prevent it from drying. Set rollers of pasta machine at their
  widest setting.  Flatten small piece of dough, dust with flour and
  fold in half. Run it through pasta machine. Repeat this step 5 to 8
  times until dough is smooth and not sticky. Change notch of pasta
  machine to the next setting and run dough through once without
  folding. Keep changing setting and working pasta sheet through
  machine until pasta reaches desired thickness. A good thickness for
  general use is about 1/16 inch. Sprinkle dough with flour between
  rollings if it is sticky.
 
MMMMM

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