Mason-Dixon Recipes

Fettuccine Alfredo

Fettuccine Alfredo is macaroni and cheese for adults.

         — Mitch Hedburg

Fettuccino Alfredo is an Italian pasta dish of fettuccine tossed with butter and Parmesan cheese. As the cheese melts, it emulsifies the liquids to form a smooth and rich sauce coating the pasta.

Fettuccine all’Alfredo, as it was originally called, was created in 1914 by Alfredo Di Lelio, who had four years earlier opened a restaurant in Rome, Italy, under his first name on the Via della Scrofa. At the time Alfredo’s wife had given birth to their son Armando, but afterward, she was left without an appetite.

Alfredo tried everything, until he made a plate of fresh fettuccine and swirled it in a pan with Parmigiano and butter. One bite and his wife’s appetite returned. Alfredo knew he was on to something, so he made fettuccine with an enormous quantity of eggs and three kinds of flour. The butter was a triple cream—the richest available—and the Parmigiano-Reggiano was cut from the core of the wheel.

And that was it. He cooked and drained the pasta, tossed it in the pan with the butter and cheese, and Fettuccine all’Alfredo was born. The dish would have remained one among many on Alfredo’s menu. Since World War I had intervened, Rome wasn't teeming with tourists. That is, until the Roaring Twenties when Americans, dying for alcohol unavailable back home during Prohibition, hopped steamships and set sail for Europe.

Among those who traveled to Rome were the two biggest Hollywood stars of the period, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, who were traveling on their honeymoon in 1920. Dining at Alfredo’s restaurant they fell in love with his fettuccine dish and dined at Alfredo’s daily. Years later, they returned to present the owner with a gold-plated spoon and fork inscribed “To Alfredo the King of the noodles July 1927.”

The international press picked up on the story and spread the fame of Alfredo’s noodle dish around the world. Within a year, a recipe had appeared in the United States, printed in The Rector Cook Book by George Rector.

World War II closed Alfredo's restaurant. Since that time, chef's everywhere, but especially in America, tried to mimic Alfredo's classic dish, without real success. The problem was that no cook could possibly obtain the same ingredients Alfredo had at his disposal.

The ground wheat flour for the pasta was not available, and Italian eggs from a variety of chicken breeds differed from American breeds. The butter was not anywhere near as rich as it was there, and, most important, Parmigiano-Reggiano was not imported into the United States until well after World War II.

In order to make the dish, then, cooks resorted to boosting the richness by adding heavy cream, even a little flour to help thicken the sauce. Then, of course, some cooks had to elaborate on the dish by adding parsley. There’s an Italian saying that “Parsley is like children. It gets into everything,” which is not a compliment.

As time went on, Italian food chains like Olive Garden and Macaroni Grill started tossing in all sorts of things, and the frozen food section of supermarkets calls any number of items with an oily cream sauce “Alfredo.” You can even buy a whole jar of the stuff, but it's not even close to what Alfredo created back in 1914.[1]

Snootier Roman restaurateurs got so sick of American tourists asking for fettuccine all’Alfredo that they started to list it under “fettuccine al burro” (with butter) or "fettuccine alla crema” (with cream) for their American clientele. So, while the recipe below is not really Fettucine Alfredo, I have the unmitigated American gall to call it that.

INGREDIENTS

24 oz dry Fettuccino pasta
2 sticks (16 oz or 1 cup) butter
³/₄ pint heavy cream
8 oz unsalted butter, room temperature
³/₄ cup shredded Romano cheese
¹/₂ cup shredded Parmesan cheese
¹/₈ tsp garlic salt
— salt
— pepper

DIRECTIONS

Place a sauce pan filled with water on medium heat.

While waiting for it to boil, in a small saucepan, melt butter. Whisk while slowly pouring in heavy cream. Continue to whisk until well blended. Remove the saucepan from heat.

Add the cheese and whisk until melted. Add garlic salt and salt and pepper to taste. If mixture is too thick, add more heavy cream until the sauce reaches desired consistency.

When pasta is done cooking (about 15-20 minutes). drain and toss it with the cheese sauce. Store your leftover fettuccine Alfredo in an airtight container for up to three days. Reheat gently in the microwave or on the stove.


[1] This history is taken from a Forbes article by John Mariani  It includes ways to get close to the ingredients Alfredo Di Lelio used, but be fore-warned. It's difficult.

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