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Ribbon Macaroni (Pasta fatta in Casa. Fettuccini)
2 1/2 cups of flour 2 eggs 3 tablespoons of cold water 1/2 teaspoon of salt Put the flour on a bread-board. Make a hole in the middle of it, and break the eggs into it. Add the water and the salt, and mix all together with a fork until the flour is all absorbed and you have a paste which you can roll out. Then take a rolling-pin and roll it out very thin, about the thickness of a ten-cent piece. Leave it spread out like this until it has dried a little. Then double it over a number of times, always lengthwise, and cut it across in strips about one-half inch wide. Boil two quarts of salted water, and put the ribbons into it, and cook for ten minutes, then drain. Serve with the meat and sauce as in receipt for Macaroni with Meat and Sauce, or with the tomato sauce and cheese only, as desired.
A straightforward egg-and-flour dough, with one timing that needs correcting outright. Everything else translates directly.
- Cooking timeTen minutes will reduce fresh fettuccine to mush. Rolled this thin and only briefly dried, the ribbons are done in 2 to 4 minutes — taste one at two minutes and go from there. Ten minutes is a time better suited to dried commercial macaroni.
- A ten-cent pieceA dime is about 1.35 mm thick, which is a reasonable target for fettuccine. On a pasta machine that is a middle setting rather than the thinnest; by hand, thin enough that the board's grain shows faintly through the sheet.
- FlourPlain all-purpose flour works and is what the book assumes. Semolina or durum flour gives more bite but needs a little more water and more kneading than the fork-mixing described here.
- Hydration2 1/2 cups of flour to 2 eggs and 3 tablespoons of water is a firm, dry dough by modern habit. Eggs of the period were not sized to any fixed standard, so hold back some of the water and add it only if the flour will not come together.
- KneadingThe recipe says only to mix with a fork, but the dough wants 8 to 10 minutes of kneading and then 30 minutes covered at room temperature before rolling. Unrested dough springs back and will not thin out evenly.
- Drying before cuttingThis is the step that decides whether the ribbons separate or weld together. Fifteen to twenty minutes on the board is usually right: the surface should be leathery to the touch but the sheet should still fold without cracking. Flour the sheet before folding, and shake the cut ribbons out loose at once.
- Cooking waterTwo quarts is enough for this batch but no more; use a wide pot and salt the water assertively, about a tablespoon. Fresh pasta sheds starch quickly, so save a little of the water to loosen the sauce.
- YieldServes about four as a first course, three as a main.
Fettuccine means simply "little ribbons," and the book's own subtitle — pasta fatta in casa, pasta made at home — marks the real distinction being drawn. By the early twentieth century dried macaroni and spaghetti were industrial products, shipped and sold by the box, while the egg pastas of central and northern Italy remained board-and-rolling-pin work. Antonia Isola's Simple Italian Cookery (1912) was one of the earliest books to put such recipes in front of American home cooks in English, at a period when Italian food in the United States was still largely confined to immigrant households and a handful of restaurants. The technique described here — the mound of flour, the well for the eggs, the fork — is the same one still taught, and the instruction to let the sheet dry before folding and cutting is the detail that betrays a writer who had actually watched it done.