Fettuccine Alfredo Period AOrigin theory BVerified

Fettuccine Alfredo became a restaurant staple in America as a rich plate of flat fresh pasta bound in a sauce of butter, Parmigiano cheese, and cream. The wheat pasta and the dairy are all long-established Old World ingredients; nothing in the materials stood in the way of the dish coming into being.

The dish has two stages. It began in Rome in the early twentieth century. Around 1907 to 1908, the restaurateur Alfredo di Lelio devised a plate for his wife, whose appetite had flagged after childbirth, emulsifying generous butter with Parmigiano. This original, called fettuccine al triplo burro, or triple-butter fettuccine, contained no cream at all.

It crossed to America in 1927, when the actors Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks visited the Rome restaurant and carried the memory home from their honeymoon. Through those Hollywood names it spread to American restaurants. But American butter and cheese were leaner than the Italian kind, and would not give the same richness on their own. So cooks added cream to make up the body, and by around 1966, through recipes such as the one printed on Pennsylvania Dutch dry-pasta packages, the cream version took firm hold. The current cream-sauce dish comes from this second stage, the American remaking.

Fettuccine Alfredo was created by Alfredo di Lelio in Rome in 1908: this is the familiar account, and it is all the more believable because the inventor really existed. That di Lelio devised a plate in 1907 to 1908 is not in dispute; the record bears that much out.

The trouble is in equating that early plate with the origin of the current American cream sauce. The first time a dish is written down, or first remembered, is not always the moment the dish we now eat came into being. What di Lelio devised was the butter-and-cheese triple-butter, a different thing from today's cream-based sauce. And, ironically, the cream version that spread around the world is scarcely to be found in Italy itself. In Rome, places like Il Vero Alfredo still keep the butter-and-cheese original, while the American cream version is hard to find on an Italian table at all.

So this dish has come down to us with its origin tale (Rome, 1908) and the dish people actually eat (the American cream version) pulling apart. It is a clear case of an old pedigree held up as a banner while the substance was made later, in another land: a tradition made up after the fact, the historian Eric Hobsbawm's phrase for exactly this kind of borrowed antiquity. Not to mistake the year the dish was first devised for the year the cream sauce was created, and to see how the substance was swapped out behind the label of an authentic native dish, is the heart of this dish's history.