Original fettuccine Alfredo recipe

The story of this fettuccine alfredo recipe is well known, so if you have read it before, just skip the next few paragraphs...

Alfredo de Lelio at that time ran a restaurant in Rome called Alfredo alla Scorfa. His wife was pregnant and had had trouble keeping her food down. He whipped up this dish to get her eating again, and later served it to customers.

Actually, Alfredo de Lelio did not really "invent" this dish as the Italians had all along been tossing their pasta in cheese and butter or cream.

They would sometimes add butter before as well as after the fettuccine was tossed into the dish, in which case the butter would be called doppio burro, meaning "double butter". But what Alfredo de Lelio did was to double the amount of butter before adding the fettuccine, in effect creating a "triple" butter.

He also put his name to this Fettuccine Alfredo recipe.

Oh yes, and he did one more thing. He served it to some famous Hollywood stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, who visited his restaurant when they were honeymooning in Rome in 1927. The couple took the dish to Hollywood, served it to their friends... and that was how Fettuccine Alfredo became famous.

Unforunately, fame also led to countless adulteration and "bastardization" of this Fettucine Alfredo recipe. Today, you will find many different versions of this Fettuccine Alfredo recipe, made with milk, cream, half-and-half, etc, as well as containing other ingredients like chicken, shrimp and seafood.

The one time I ate Fettuccine Alfredo, very very long ago, must have been one of those adulterated versions. It didn't leave much of an impression and I never ordered the dish again even though, at one stage about 15 years ago, I ate at Italian restaurants fairly regularly.

Having now discovered the original Fettucinne Alfredo recipe, I don't mind eating it more often. Like many other authentic Italian pasta recipes, the appeal of this recipe lies in its simplicity.