Author: Jesse Yancy

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Fettucini Alfredo

In 1914, Ines, the wife of Alfredo di Lelio, who ran a restaurant on the Via della Scrofa in Rome, was suffering from almost incessant nausea during her pregnancy with her first child. One of the few foods she was able to keep down was a dish of plain pasta, pasta in bianco, or white pasta, Alfredo made fresh and tossed with butter and grated Parmesan. Alfredo eventually added it to the restaurant’s menu, where in 1920 it was tasted by Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, who were visiting the city on their honeymoon. That day, the pasta happened to be fettuccini. They asked for the recipe, brought it home to the States, and sent a gift of a gold fork and spoon engraved with the words, “to Alfredo the King of the noodles” and their names.

Eating “Alfredo’s fettuccine” on trips to Rome became a destination for the Hollywood elite, and other tourists followed suit. Di Lilio sold the restaurant in 1943, but the new owner kept the restaurant’s name (Alfredo alla Scrofa), the menu, and the celebrity photos on the wall. In 1950, Alfredo and his son Armando opened another restaurant, Il Vero Alfredo, “the true Alfredo,” which is now managed by Alfredo’s grandchildren. Both restaurants claim to have originated the dish. Fettuccine alfredo, which in Italy is nothing more than buttered noodles with dry cheese, didn’t take off in Italy as it did in the United States, where it was popularized by another Alfredo’s opened by di Lilio and a partner near Rockefeller Center in New York City.

An American alfredo (with cream) is at best a simple reduction with a good hard grating cheese like Parmesan or Romano, prepared for individual servings to be eaten immediately. You can use almost any pasta, but you must use whole cream and freshly grated cheese (none of that stuff in the round green container, okay?) Cook the pasta beforehand, using about six to eight ounces of uncooked pasta per serving, making two cups or so cooked until just done, coated with vegetable oil and stored in a sealed container. When ready, heat your saucepan, add about three tablespoons butter (be generous), then working quickly, add a very generous handful of pasta, toss to coat with butter, then add about a half cup cream. Toss again while adding enough grated cheese to make a thick, creamy sauce. You shouldn’t need salt, just a little pepper. Serve at once.

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Pepper Season

Peppers in Mississippi don’t carry the same cachet they do in parts of Louisiana and Carolina where their cultivation and consumption has become a fetish.

That’s not to say that we don’t have our share of connoisseurs here, for indeed we do, even eccentrics who will trot you out to a raised bed in their back yard in order that you might make appropriately appreciative noises over their ghosts. You’ll even find reapers and habaneros at a farmers’ market which I find more evident of their ease of culture than their demand for the table.

The staples prevail. Topmost are the thick-walled bells, best smaller than a fist, dark and tight. Country-style lunches should always include the crunch and zest of fresh sliced onion and sweet banana pepper to cut fat-stewed vegetables. Jalapenos here tend to be woody with more heat than taste, but deseeded and minced they’ll serve in a pico or pureed in a thin salsa. Poblanos should have a larger role in our kitchens, as should all the mild thin-walled capsicums. The thick-walled cherries are regrettably still a novelty.

The Mississippi pepper season begins in earnest when the thin cayennes come to market, as they did today in the form of two mesh baskets filled with spindly green pods marked to sell for a dollar each. At such a price my jaw dropped. The vendor, apologizing (!) said she’d have red ones soon, which she’s sure to mark up, but the greens are just as good if not more so, even dried. We’re finding less and less of the long cayennes now, so if you find a vendor, woo them, fawn and flatter, because cayennes will get you through the winter in the form of sauce or vinegar. Tabascos will too, and they grow well here, in my experience better than cayennes. The meatier tabascos make a better mash for red sauce, but both are equally good simply destemmed, pierced, packed into a jar with salt and filled with hot vinegar.

For two years now I’ve been growing pequinos first sent as a cropped plant from a friend in Austin. In the landscape of my mind where all sorts possibilities entertain themselves, the fiery little pequin is what I remember called a bird’s-eye pepper, not the Asian variety.  Pequinos grow at a glacial rate from seed so must be pruned and overwintered.