So Exactly How Did Poor Alfredo Get
Sauced?
It was about a hundred years ago that a
guy in Rome opened an eponymous little restaurant. He was doing a
good business, raising a nice family. Then his place got discovered
by American tourists and the next thing you know, he was sauced.
Funny thing, though; after he got sauced, everybody in America knew
his name, but he remains largely forgotten in his native country.
I'm talking, of course, about Alfredo
di Lelio and the ubiquitous creation that bears his name, “Alfredo
sauce.” It stares at you from restaurant menus all over the United
States. And not just so-called “Italian” restaurants. Nearly
everyplace that serves food serves something in “Alfredo sauce.”
It lurks in jars on grocery store shelves and it lies in wait in
frozen packages. There are hundreds of recipes for it in cookbooks
and online resources.
In reality, it shouldn't even exist.
And in Italy – the country of Alfredo's birth – it doesn't.
So how did Alfredo get sauced? In
simple, “Clue”-like terms, the actor did it in Hollywood with a
fork and a spoon.
Poor Alfredo. His wife was pregnant and
having a hard time keeping anything on her stomach. All he wanted was
for her to be able to eat something. And so he served her a simple
dish bland enough for her sensitive stomach to tolerate. He made her
a nice plate of pasta in bianco. White pasta. Pasta without
any sauce, just some butter and cheese. Also called pasta al
burro, it was a common dish for people in her condition. You gave
it to your kids when they had upset tummies.
What do Americans feed pregnant women
with morning sickness or kids with upset stomachs? Toast, right? With
a little butter? Or maybe some saltine crackers. Something easy to
digest that will sit lightly on the stomach. Well, they don't do
toast or crackers in Italy. They do pasta al burro.
Does your favorite cookbook include a
recipe for buttered toast? I didn't think so. And nobody in Italy had
to come up with a recipe for pasta in bianco. It was just
something you made by boiling up some pasta and putting a little
butter and cheese on it.
Alfredo didn't have it on the menu.
What restaurateur in his right mind would make a special out of the
equivalent of buttered toast? Alfredo pumped up the butter and the
cheese for his wife so the dish would have a little more flavor, but
it was still just pasta al burro, only doppio burro
(double butter), or maybe triplo burro (triple butter) if
Alfredo was feeling generous. Nothing special, okay?
And then Douglas Fairbanks and Mary
Pickford, honeymooning in Rome, happened upon Alfredo's little place.
They saw what he was feeding his wife and they wanted some. “Okay,”
Alfredo probably thought, scratching his head, “give the crazy
Americans what they want!” And he slapped down a plate of pasta
without sauce. Whatever makes i turisti happy.
Now, unless you're ninety years of age
or more or maybe a film historian, the names “Douglas Fairbanks”
and”Mary Pickford” are likely meaningless to you. But in the
silent movie era, he was the “Thief of Baghdad,” he was “Zorro,”
he was “Robin Hood,” he was the undisputed swashbuckling “King
of Hollywood.” She was his new wife and “America's Sweetheart”
in her own right. Along with Charlie Chaplin, they were the
movie industry in America, founding members of United Artists studio
and of the Motion Picture Academy. By comparison, they made Brad Pitt
and Angelina Jolie look like relative unknowns.
So when this power couple lifted
forkfuls of Alfredo's plain, simple pasta dish to their lips and
pronounced it the most unique and delicious thing they had ever
eaten.....well, what are you gonna do? They had photographs taken of
themselves with Alfredo and they presented him with a golden fork and
spoon to mount on his wall. Then they went back to Hollywood and sang
the praises of “Fettuccine Alfredo” to everybody they knew –
and they knew a lot of people.
Soon, the Hollywood elite were storming
Italy in search of “Fettuccine Alfredo.” And unless they went to
Alfredo's place – “Alfredo alla Scrofa” – in Rome, nobody
knew what they were talking about. “Che cosa è questo
'fettuccine Alfredo?'” So they'd describe the dish. Mystified
waiters and cooks would look at them strangely and say, “You want
the Italian equivalent of buttered toast? What are you, sick or
something?” Or words to that effect. Only Alfredo – who knew a
cash cow when he saw it – had the good sense to put the dish on his
menu. And that's pretty much the way it remains today.
But how did Alfredo get sauced?
Well, Americans have never been much
for leaving well enough alone. No matter how good something is,
Americans feel it can always be “improved” upon. And so it is
with “Alfredo sauce.”
A properly made dish of what Alfredo
actually served creates its own “sauce” by means of blending
butter and cheese with hot pasta and a little of the water in which
the pasta was cooked. The cheese and butter melt together and, when
vigorously tossed with the hot pasta and water, coat the noodles in a
rich, creamy “sauce.” But Alfredo, to his dying day, never made
“Alfredo sauce.” It simply doesn't exist in the Italian culinary
world.
So Americans had to improvise. They
figured out a way to “improve” Alfredo's common preparation. They
added cream. Why? Let me emphatically state something here and now:
There is absolutely, positively, unequivocally no cream in an
“authentic” preparation of what we know as “Fettuccine
Alfredo.” So why the pollution? A lot of it has to do with the
quality of butter Americans serve themselves.
Most commercially produced American
butter contains no more than eighty percent butterfat and has a water
content of between fifteen and twenty percent. European butter, on
the other hand, generally contains more butterfat – up to
eighty-three percent – and less water, making it richer and
creamier.
And then there's the cheese. Alfredo
probably never even thought of using anything but
Parmigiano-Reggiano. Why would he? It's “the undisputed King of
Cheeses.” There are cheaper alternatives being marketed under the
“Parmesan cheese” label, but they are just that – cheap
imitations of the real thing.
So, after the great discovery by
Fairbanks and Pickford, American cooks started getting requests for
“Fettuccine Alfredo.” They figured out how to make it – but
somehow it didn't taste the same. It wasn't as rich and creamy. And
what's the easiest way to make something creamy? Add cream to it, of
course! So now, rather than let the rich flavor develop naturally
from using high quality butter and superior cheese, American cooks
threw together cheap butter and cheap cheese and made it “creamy”
by adding cream.
Besides, you can't very well package
the results of the intermingling of butter and cheese with hot pasta
and a little water, now can you? But if you dump the butter and
cheese in a pot, stir in a few glugs of cream and cook it all down,
now you've got a “sauce;” something you can put in a jar with a
label: “Alfredo Sauce.”
And that's how poor old Alfredo got
sauced.
Nowadays, when you visit almost any
restaurant in America and order something “Alfredo,” it's a
pretty sure bet that the kitchen is going to be pouring “Alfredo”
out of a jar or, at best, making it up from a recipe that includes
cream. Some places further adulterate it by mixing in nutmeg, chives,
and any other number of “flavor enhancers,” simply because
Americans have an insatiable urge to complicate simple food in the
name of “flavor.” But no matter what they add to it, it bears no
reasonable resemblance to the wonderfully rich – and ridiculously
simple – traditional dish that Alfredo served to his wife – and
later to his patrons – at his ristorante on the via della
Scrofa.
If you want the real deal, your best
bet is to bypass the restaurants and skip the jarred, frozen, and
packaged varieties of “sauce” found in your local megamarket and
make it yourself. Here's a recipe, courtesy of Russell Bellanca, owner of Alfredo 100:
1 lb. of fresh, very thin fettuccine
noodles
6 oz. butter, unsalted
6 oz. Parmigiano Reggiano cheese (aged
24 months), grated
Cook the fettuccine noodles in 1 gallon
of salted boiling water for three minutes.
At the same time, cube or slice the
butter into a warmed serving bowl. Drain the pasta, reserving a small
amount of the cooking water. Pour the pasta into the serving bowl
with the butter and immediately top with cheese. Using a large spoon
and fork, toss and spin the noodles for two or three minutes, adding
reserved pasta cooking water as required, until the noodles are
thoroughly coated and a smooth, silky sauce has developed. Plate the
preparation and serve immediately.
(Cheese lovers may want to sprinkle
additional grated cheese on top.)
You can substitute dry pasta for fresh,
of course, but don't cheap up on any of the ingredients. High quality
pasta, like De Cecco or Barilla, will taste and perform better than
generic store brands. European-style butter, like Plugra or
Kerrygold, will impart a richer flavor than store brands or even
national brands like Land 'o Lakes. And there is absolutely no
substitute for Parmigiano-Reggiano. Domestic “Parmesan” doesn't
cut it, and the dry, grated, cheese-flavored sawdust abomination in
the green cans shouldn't even be considered. The technical trick to
perfect preparation is all in the wrist. The biggest part of the
“show” that Alfredo used to put on tableside when serving his
dish was the tossing of the pasta with the butter and cheese to form
the silky, smooth, rich, creamy “sauce” for which he became
famous. Anything less than vigorously tossing and spinning for two or
three minutes will result in lumpy, clumpy bits of cheese in a pool
of melted butter. If you don't have the time, the technique, or the
ingredients to do it right, you're better off with the junk in a jar.
And if you find yourself in Italy don't
ask for the culinary equivalent of buttered toast unless you're not
feeling well. Or unless you're dining at Alfredo's in Rome. Anyplace
else and they'll just look at you funny and say, “stai
scherzando? Devi essere ubriaco!” To
which you can reply, “I'm not kidding and I'm not drunk. I'd just
like to be a little sauced. Like Alfredo.”
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