a love letter to fettuccine
tagliatelle v fettuccine and where you can score the best fettuccine in Rome
Truth be told, I f*cking love fettuccine.
With hibernation season near and all the porcini galore, there’s no greater excuse than to eat all the fettuccine. Because - contrary to popular belief - fettuccine is better than tagliatelle.
What? Wait aren’t they like the same thing? Maybe? Anyways - how dare you insult the immaculate pasta legacy of the bolognese?!?!?
Well, I did. And, I will explain why.
It all comes down to 3 things - tradition, length, and width. Yes, the size matters when it comes to pasta.
The tradition
I am sure you’ve heard of fettuccine alfredo, a glorified Italian-American pasta dish that has its roots in Rome - from the famous Alfredo De Lelio dating back to 1907 or 1908. It wasn’t tagliatelle alfredo, it was fettuccine alfredo - and for a reason.
Fettuccine is the dominant handmade long ribbon-like pasta of Rome and many parts of central/southern Italy.
Fettuccine (or la fettuccina [singular] that many Romans refer to it as) is a long handmade pasta made with flour, water and oftentimes egg. It looks like a thin ribbon, nearly identical to tagliatelle. It can be found dried as well, though the best is freshly made.
The funny thing is that fettuccine doesn’t really have rules, per se. I mean look - it was transformed into a dish heavy enough to turn anyone into a celiac. All jokes aside, fettuccine Alfredo (the American one, at least) is not the best representation of la fettuccina’s beauty.
This is the reason fettuccine and tagliatelle have become so interchangeable. Some say fettuccine is thinner and - while it is still a long handmade pasta - it’s shorter than tagliatelle. But, I will tell you - I have had many of fettuccine that were thick. And I liked it.
That’s because fettuccine is more of a casereccio (homestyle) or as I like to say contadino (farmer) pasta than tagliatelle. While the two pasta types of become synonymous even in Rome, tagliatelle is still so much more fancy. It has the bolognese history behind it - with a rigorous art of handmade pasta that they fervently defined because…
Pasta is political, people.
Example: The accomplished sfoglina Alessandra Spisni (who was recently featured on the latest Chef’s Table - Noodles Edition) opens her tagliatelle video with a firm announcement:
“Ragazzi, tagliatelle NON fettuccine!”
You can actually take a class with Spisni in Bologna at her acclaimed VSB Bologna – Associazione delle Sfogline, a pasta school where you could even become a master pasta maker (sfoglino/a) like Evan Funke in Chef’s Table.
Fettuccine comes in as the contadino, the farmer. It doesn’t really have food rules. It’s just about eating well, and fast. It’s no wonder it’s the pasta that immigrated to America much earlier than tagliatelle (the latter arrived with the more recent appreciation for Italian pasta making in America.) Fettuccine was already there - it came with mostly southern Italian immigrants, which is also why it was sometimes just called maccarun’.
Regardless, fettuccine is much more flexible than tagliatelle - making it inferior to some. But to me - it’s fiercely and foremost the best.
The size apparently matters
To be more precise, I will briefly dive deep into the shape, size, length, width etc… difference between tagliatelle and fettuccine.
And it brings us right back to pasta politics - starting with tagliatelle.
la tagliatella
The singular of tagliatelle - deriving from tagliata, or cut from the giant sfoglia or rolled dough of pasta.
Bologna has a law - la Denominazione Comunale (De.Co.) - that protects tagliatelle, more specifically the dish la tagliatella alla bolognese. The De.Co. only covers the comune (or municipality) of Bologna - it’s not a national thing, reminding us that Italy is and will always be fragmented especially by food.
Still the De.Co. articles exactly how each “tagliatella” should be made.
Below is a translation of the tagliatella rules from the official De.Co. Bologna site:
The recipe and the measurement of Bologna’s true tagliatella were deposited at the Chamber of Commerce of Bologna on April 16th, 1972 by Francesco Majani and Alcino Cesari, on behalf of the Italian Academy of Cuisine.
Based on the gold sample they provied, preserved in a special case, the tagliatella must be 8 mm wide when cooked and approximately 7 mm when raw. The measurement would correspond to 12,270 thousandths of the height of the Asinelli tower.
Yes, you read that right. The tagliatelle should be a specific fraction of the height of Bologna’s famous (and leaning) tower - la Torre degli Asinelli - as seen below.
la fettuccina
The singular of fettuccine with its name meaning ‘little ribbon,’ for its shape.
Fettucine doesn’t have any legal regulations on its shape or dimensions, however, many cooks often go by the rule that fettuccine should be 3mm to 5mm wide when raw and 4 mm to 6mm wide when cooked - so roughly a couple of centimeters narrower than tagliatelle.
Truthfully, I don’t think any nonna was or is pulling out a measuring stick. If she, her mother, and grandmother called it fettuccine, it’s fettuccine. Even if it’s thicker than tagliatelle, it is still fettuccine.
And, honestly, until researching this well, I always thought fettuccine was wider. Apart from the dried pasta versions, fresh fettuccine I’ve encountered could be thicker than tagliatelle or thinner. The texture could be smooth or rough.
In other words, Italian food rules aren’t always rightfully true.
Who calls it what and where
This is a question that would truthfully take a lifetime to answer. But, I will give a general gist.
You’ll often find more tagliatelle up north and fettuccine down south. If you’re in Bologna (or the region of Emilia) it’s fettuccine who?
Still, this isn’t always the case. Pasta is migratory, and that’s not just to the US. Italians move all around their peninsula, bringing their traditions with them and fusing them with those around them. It’s probably why tagliatelle and fettuccine have become so interchangeable.
No matter the difference, the most important thing to give your attention to is the love put in that plate of pasta. And you enjoy every bite of it.
Fettuccine famous
Fettuccine is not married to its celebrity sauce Alfredo. It is a free baby that tastes so good with so many things.
LIKE RAP MUSIC?! - Do you know how many American rappers make fettuccine references? Lil Wayne, Future, Common, Tyga are all counting that fettuccine money. They get it.
Example A:
“Neck like two shows, five star, fettuccine. This bitch a boppalini” - Bop by Tyga, Blueface & YG.
Boppalini? That’s got to be a new pasta - DeCecco? Get on it STAT!
Fettuccine to me is more of a cold-weather food. It is bountiful, fills you up, and tastes best with the things that come with cool weather - mushrooms (like Fall’s sexy King porcini), artichokes, any kind of ragu, truffle, and so much more… like the fettuccine alla papalina, the Pope’s fettuccine which is basically one of the precursors to carbonara.
More on this blasphemous pasta later.
The sluttiest fettuccine
What you are all here for.
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