Fettuccine Alfredo

In the 1914, a Roman restaurateur named Alfredo di Lelio is credited with the invention of Fettuccine Alfredo.

He came with recipe in order to tempt his pregnant wife who had become weak from loss of appetite.

Di Lelio determined to get her to eat, transformed his fettuccine al-burro – a homely preparation of pasta tossed with butter and parmesan – by significant increasing the amount of butter he used.

The result was a more lavish dish, which neither his wife nor his customers could resist.

Di Lelio’s signature dish was prepared tableside; as the heat from the noodles melted the butter, the smiling and mustachioed di Lelio lifted and twirled the fettuccine with a gold fork and spoon, pausing to sprinkle in copious amount of grated cheese.

While the original consisted simply of butter and cheese, ‘Alfredo’ has become ubiquitous term that covers everything from a rich sauce to additions of vegetables, chicken, and seafood.

The dish and its creator became famous in Rome, but they were unknown outside of Italy until 1920, when George Rector an American restsaurant owner, writer and bon vivant, sang their praises in his Saturday Evening Post column

Fettuccini Alfredo achieved world fame in 1920 when Hollywood legends Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford dined at his restaurant while honeymoon in Rome, they were so pleased with the dish that they presented Alfredo with a gold plated fork and spoon.

In 1966, food packagers jumped on the trend the Pennsylvania Dutch noodle company started marketing fettuccini with a recipe from Alfredo’s sauce.
Fettuccine Alfredo

History of spaghetti

In an Etruscan tomb north of Rome from about 400 BC has a mural of servant mixing flour and water, then shaping it into noodles. Most historian believe that this pasta was baked, not boiled.

Pasta was brought to Italy by Arabs. It was the occupation of Sicily in 827 by an Arab army that brought hard durum wheat, the main ingredient in pasta to Italy.

Noodles known as ristha were eaten in ancient Persia and are mentioned in the cookbooks of medieval Islam.

In twelfth century, Arabs founded a pasta industry near Palermo, using grain from fields planted earlier by the Romans. They describe a concoction called itriya, from their word meaning ‘string’ which currently known as pasta and was the same as it is made today.

Spaghetti in Italian means ‘little strings’. Boiling pasta may well have originated in Arabic cultures, especially since couscous, a product similar to pasta, was already being boiled in Palestine in the second century.

Islamic geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi mentioned boiled noodles as a prize of civilization a hundred years before Marco Polo got back from the Far East. This is the first written account of the production of dry pasta, which spread from Sicily throughout Italy.

He mentioned about the pasta to be produced on a commercial scale in a survey of Sicily that he wrote at the request of his Norman master, King Roger II.

From these tenuous origins, Italians learned to make many pasta by hand, but mostly strings, tubes, and ribbons. Eventually, pasta became a huge industry, feeding masses of Italians since the mid-nineteenth century.
History of spaghetti

History of Pasta Processing

History of Pasta Processing
Pasta is a generic term used in reference to the whole range of products commonly known as spaghetti, macaroni and noodles. When the humans discovered agriculture, they also invented bread and pasta. Actually, pasta is a kind of “bread” made by flour and water. Opposite bread, pasta is a flat strips or small squares.

Italy is generally regarded as the home of pasta products. In the fifteenth century, Italians learned how to make noodles from the Germans, who had previously learned the process in their travels to Asia.

In the 1500s dry pasta manufacturers were founded all over the Italy. The dough was mixed by foot and compressed by 3-4 workers sitting on a long wooden pool. The dough was presses into bronze plate as vermicelli, trennette, lasagnette, farfalle, pennette, conchiglie and other pasta forms, still known today.

The short forms were kept in drawers while the long forms were dried in the open.

The first mechanical devices for pasta manufacturing were invented in the 1800s.

Around 1850, the first hand-operated pasta press was built. By 1860 more elaborated presses had been had been made. By increasing the popularity of pasta it required more efficient production process to be developed.

By early 1900s, mixers, kneaders, hydraulic piston type extrusion presses and drying cabinets were available for batch manufacturing of pasta.

In 1933, the first continuous single screw using low temperature drying profiles that mimicked open air drying conditions typical of the region around Naples, Italy. It replacing the batch system.

Extruder was developed by Joseph Bramah, in England in 1797 before applied to pasta processing.

It required 18 to 20 hours to dry pasta when using a low temperature drying profile. High temperature drying (60 to 80 degree C) of pasta was introduced in 1974 and ultra high temperature (80 to 100 degree C) drying was introduced in the late 1980s.

Drying at high or ultrahigh temperatures has reduced drying time of long goods (e.g., spaghetti) to about 10 and 6 hours, respectively.

Today, pasta manufacturing is totally automated with pasta presses capable of producing spaghetti at 3,5000 kg/h and macaroni at 8,000 kg/h.
History of Pasta Processing