How the Hot Dog Found Its Bun Read Online Free PDF Page B

express her displeasure. (I’m guessing it was the F-word, Spanish style.) Looking around at some of the children in the kitchen she caught herself at the last moment and blurted out “chimichanga,” which translates roughly to the Spanish version of thingamajig . As the restaurant’s menu says today, “Thankfully for all of us, Monica was a controlled and creative cuss.”
    The dish, which was once dubbed one of America’s top fifty plates by USA Today , does have others who claim to be its inventor. Some historians suggest that local Native American tribes or Mexicans on the Sonoran border were frying up burrito-esque meals long before Flin’s discovery. George Jacob, owner of another Tucson restaurant called Club 21, said he produced the first fried burrito when a traveler from the east found the traditional type too blah. Jacob slathered it with shortening and used the grill to brown it. The pan-fried creation immediately went on his menu. As Jacob’s restaurant didn’t open until 1946, it’s likely that if he decided the fried burrito was menu worthy, he did so after Flin’s folly. Plus, Jacob’s original dish wasn’t dunked in the deep-fryer. To this day, El Charro still exists with Flin’s great-grandniece Carlotta Flores continuing the tradition. She has made a few changes; most notably, lard has been replaced with canola oil in the fryer.
    If Flin’s story seems familiar to some Midwesterners, it’s probably because St. Louis’s popular toasted ravioli—deep-fried, meat-filled pasta sprinkled with herbs and grated parmesan cheese—has a similar origin. The most common story about its birth sets the invention’s discovery sometime between the 1930s and 1950s at a restaurant called Oldani’s in the Italian area of St. Louis known as The Hill. One of the restaurant’s cooks, Fritz (history only gives us his first name), mistakenly deep-fried a batch of ravioli when he thought a pot of hot oil was water. A variation has him simply knocking the ravioli into the oil accidentally. No matter, the tale proves that, as was the case with the chimichanga, good things can happen when food falls into the fryer.
     
     
    Fettuccine Alfredo: Finicky new mom
    For a chef, there may be no greater indignity than an inability to get your spouse to eat your cooking. This was the ignominy that Alfredo di Lelio was facing circa 1914. Now, di Lelio, who ran a fine restaurant in Rome called Trattoria Alfredo, did have a major factor working against him. His wife, Ines, had just given birth to a baby and the whole affair had completely ruined her appetite.
    “It was a hell of a life,” di Lelio was once quoted as saying. “Work all day and rock the baby at night. I had to do something.”
      
    Desperate, he went with the most comforting dish he could imagine. It featured wide noodles smothered in a heap of Parmesan cheese and lots of butter. In particular, the copious amounts of thick butter—yes, this was before cholesterol concerns and the widespread use of defibrillators—was so rich and inviting that it restored Ines’s taste for food and gave di Lelio a signature dish. (The cream version that Americans love would emerge in the United States many decades later.)
    Fettuccine Alfredo may have remained a curious local dish, if not for a little Hollywood glitz and some good old-fashioned American media attention. In 1927 Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford (the Brad and Angelina of their day) were on vacation in Rome when they happened upon di Lelio’s little trattoria. A genial host, di Lelio whipped up his house special for the stars, who loved it.
    How much did they love it?
    The pair returned to the restaurant later in the trip and gave di Lelio a golden fork-and-spoon-set to toss his creation. One was engraved with Pickford’s signature and the other with Fairbanks’s and each had the inscription To Alfredo—the king of the noodles . Upon returning to Hollywood, Fairbanks and Pickford praised the food to