Fettuccine Alfredo. The real story!

Fettuccine Alfredo or fettuccine al burro is a pasta dish made from fettuccine tossed with Parmesan cheese and butter. As the cheese melts, it emulsifies the liquids to form a smooth and rich sauce coating on the pasta. That's what the history books would have you believe anyway..

The real story concerned a young Italian Lad by the name of Fettuchini (Italian for weak chinned) who owned a burro that he called Alfredo! Interestingly, old Alfredo was a real uptight burro that would jump at the smallest sound. And so it was one day, while Futtuchini was making normal spaghetti pasta, that he accidentally dropped his spatula, which startled the burro who got all crazy, jumped and knocked over a freshly made pile of regular spaghetti onto the floor. In the confusion, he also ran over and stomped the noodles flat. Then, as Fettuchini was beating the burro, some butter and cheese got spilled right into the whole mess. Being poor, Fettuchini scraped it up as best he could and ate it anyway! And a new recipe was born! The only problem being that the historians got his name spelled wrong...

Alfredo the burro, as a side note, was shot the next day and made into stew. A true story.

Five way Cincinnati chili!

I like chili and spaghetti, so it was nice when I first heard of this very popular dish. According to my research, Cincinnati chili originated with immigrant restaurateurs from the Macedonian region who were trying to expand their customer base by moving beyond narrowly ethnic styles of cuisine.

Tom and John Kiradjieff began serving a "stew with traditional Mediterranean spices" as a topping for hot dogs which they called "coneys" in 1922 at their hot dog stand located next to a burlesque theater called the Empress. Tom Kiradjieff used the sauce to modify a traditional Greek dish, speculated to have been pastitsio, moussaka or saltsa kima to come up with a dish he called chili spaghetti. He first developed a recipe calling for the spaghetti to be cooked in the chili but changed his method in response to customer requests and began serving the sauce as a topping, eventually adding grated cheese as a topping for both the chili spaghetti and the coneys, also in response to customer requests. To make ordering more efficient, the brothers created the "way" system of ordering.

That style has since been copied and modified by many other restaurant proprietors, often fellow Greek-Macedonian immigrants who had worked at Empress restaurants before leaving to open their own chili parlors, often following the business model to the point of locating their restaurants adjacent to theaters.

My meal selection on this day, was a five way order meal-a-deal! Following is a list of 'ways'.

3-Way: Spaghetti covered with bean-less chili, topped with shredded cheddar cheese.

4-Way: A 3-Way with onions or beans.

5-Way: A 3-Way with onions and beans.