pasta

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.

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