Fettucine Alfredo with prosciutto

This past Saturday I was at Krause's in Findlay market, and perhaps because it was crowded and noisy, perhaps because I was eyeing a particularly succulent-looking roquefort, I didn't hear them call my number, and so missed my turn. Usually you have to take another number and start again, but one of the nice guys behind the counter said he'd take me as soon as he'd finished with his current customer. I got my usual knob of first-cut ham, and then asked him for a half pound of domestic provolone, sliced; Holt was thinking of roasting some red peppers, and they go well on top of bread and provolone. The guy went away for what seemed to me an inordinate length of time, and then came back with the two items, wrapped in white paper scrawled with the prices as usual. I paid and left. When we got home, I found that instead of domestic provolone, he had given me a half pound of Canadian prosciutto. It was meticulously thin-sliced and delicious, but it wasn't cheese (we had to buy some Monty Jack at IGA instead), there was too much of it, and we had no plans for it.

The first solution to this problem was a dinner of Fettucine Alfredo, gilding this particularly lily by topping it with shreds of prosciutto. The original recipe, supposedly, appears here and is sometimes known as "heart attack on a plate." We do it somewhat differently than Alfredo did: we boil down the heavy cream in a wide pan, add the grated cheese until it's the thickness we like, season with white pepper rather than black, and then drain the pasta and toss it in there, without any addition of cooking water. And we skip the golden fork.

If you're adding prosciutto, just take a few slices for each person and tear them into long strips with your fingers. Prosciutto doesn't respond well to knives, and cooking it would lose you that (very expensively acquired) delicate texture, so just leave the shreds to reach room temperature. When the plates are loaded with creamy pasta, strew each liberally with the translucent pink strips. As you eat, you can roll them into the sauce forkful by forkful, distributing their flavor throughout the meal.