fettuccine

The word fettuccine is a diminutive of fettucce, meaning small ribbons or strips, which itself comes from fetta, the Italian word for a slice. Fetta traces through late Latin to offa, meaning a morsel or lump. By the fifteenth century, cooks in Latium were cutting sheets of egg dough into long, narrow bands and calling them by this name. The shape was ancient; the vocabulary was exact.

The dish became famous in 1908 when Alfredo di Lelio, owner of a trattoria on Via della Scrofa in Rome, began serving the noodles tossed tableside with enormous quantities of butter and aged Parmigiano-Reggiano. He called it fettuccine al triplo burro. American film actors Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks dined at his restaurant in 1920 and carried the dish back to the United States, where it became known as Fettuccine Alfredo, a name Alfredo himself never used.

The pasta's architecture explains the name: a cook takes a flat sheet of dough and cuts it into strips six to eight millimeters wide. Those ribbons, flat and broad, grip sauce across their full surface in a way that round pasta of equal width cannot. Roman cooks understood this geometry long before food science named it. The word recorded the method: fettuccine were what you got when you fettare, when you sliced.

In Rome today, fettuccine al burro e Parmigiano is still a trattoria staple, simpler and older than any brand. Alfredo di Lelio's original restaurant changed hands several times over the following century. The golden fork and spoon presented to him by Pickford and Fairbanks are said to remain in one of the successor establishments, mounted on a wall above tables where visitors still order the same dish.