Hana Keith Blog Post 1 : Fettuccine

(7/7/19)

The ribbon-like noodle, glazed with delicious creamy sauce glistened on the dinner table; hunger growing within me. I look to my Noni (grandmother) to see her eyes filled with joy and warmth, proud of what we accomplished earlier that day. The first bite felt like fireworks in a dark sky. The smell, the taste and the texture unable to be compared to anything else we had eaten prior to this moment. Fettuccine is an Italian dish that consists of a wide but thin noodle that is usually paired with an Alfredo sauce. My father’s side of the family is Italian. Our family is from Lucca, Italy which is a small town in northern Italy surrounded by three contiguous walls. Fettuccine has been a loved meal in my family for generations. I was lucky enough to experience the actual process of making it with my cousins and Noni when I was ten years old.

We had spent hours earlier that day making a masterpiece that could have been just a ten minute grocery store trip. At the time, I would not have appreciated that this was much more than just consuming calories, but was in fact about bringing the families together as one, sharing the tradition and passing the special recipes and techniques down to future generations. The pasta recipe shown below is actually one of the many recipes in my great-Noni’s cookbook. I still remember the cooking aftermath, looking like a tornado had come into the kitchen. Compared to the other dishes we cooked that day (ravioli and tortellini), fettuccine’s simplicity was its very complexity. It was the first pasta dish I had ever made in my life. Through fettuccine, my Noni was educating the younger generation about much more than just the realm of pasta. After all, it was a more simple dish to make. The extenuating process felt like orders of magnitude longer than the brief period of time that we consumed the dish. Yes, it was much more. It reminds me of family, especially my Noni and handing down tradition. It was then when I learned the true meaning of my Noni’s phrase “P stands for patience.” The making of the pasta took much time and therefor much patience to make sure each noodle had the right amount of dough, was cut correctly, and had the perfect amount of flavoring. The phrase should have been “Pasta stands for patience.”

(My Noni, cousins and I making pasta)

(Fettuccine picture: https://www.modernhoney.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Fettuccine-Alfredo-Recipe-1-1024×1009.jpg )

Fettuccine is believed to have originally been made around the fifteenth century in Rome by a man named Martino da Como, however, this fettuccine was only served with butter and cheese. Later, a man named Alfredo di Lelio created the fettuccine Alfredo dish in the early 1900s also in Rome. This was different from the original fettuccine in that Alfredo added in more butter while cooking the dish. He actually created fettuccine in efforts to calm his wife during childbirth. Deemed the “king of fettuccine”, his creation spread rapidly to other countries, and is currently a very popular dish in North America. While visiting Italy with my family, we experienced pasta-making there as well. It was a mesmerizing sight to watch the beautiful Italian women with tight hair buns and pastel outfits apply the same mannerisms as my Noni while we were making our own pasta, almost as though they were frozen in time from many years ago.

(My great-Noni Barbarina Galli and great-great Aunt Assunta making fettuccine)

 

Great-Noni’s Recipe for pasta:

Recipe for specifically Fettuccine Alfredo:

(https://www.delish.com/cooking/recipe-ideas/a55312/best-homemade-fettuccine-alfredo-recipe/)

In a large pot of boiling salted water, cook pasta according to package instructions. Reserve about 1 cup of pasta water then drain.
Meanwhile, in a large skillet over medium heat, add cream and butter. Cook until the butter is melted and the cream is heated through. Whisk in Parmesan and season with salt and pepper.
Add cooked pasta and toss until coated in sauce. If the sauce is too thick, add reserved pasta water, 1 tablespoon at a time. Garnish with parsley and serve immediately.