20 Famous Dishes With Surprising Historical Namesakes

In 1908, Alfredo Di Lelio, a Roman restaurateur, created fettuccine alfredo, a simple recipe of fresh egg fettuccine with butter and grated Parmesan cheese, thinned with starchy pasta water to produce a glossy, creamy sauce. Di Lelio had hoped the comforting dish would entice his wife, Ines, back to a normal diet following childbirth. And it worked. The pasta stayed on his menu. In 1920, when the newlyweds Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, the Hollywood film stars, visited Rome, they presented Alfredo with a gold fork and spoon engraved “To Alfredo the King of the Noodles.”

In June 1889, Queen Margherita of Savoy (Italy’s queen consort) and her husband, King Umberto I, visited Naples. Raffaele Esposito, a local pizza maker, was instructed to prepare food for them. He cooked three different types of pizza, and one had ingredients that matched the colors of the Italian flag: red (tomato), white (mozzarella), and green (basil). An official at the royal household eventually sent Esposito a thank-you letter. There were already pizzas like this around Naples, but Esposito provided the name, pizza Margherita, the flag-inspired symbolism, and a royal stamp of approval.

Count Pavel Stroganov was a wealthy Russian diplomat living in Saint Petersburg who kept an open table for guests. His French head chef created a dish for these gatherings that became known as Beef Stroganov. It consisted of sautéed strips of beef served in a sauce of sour cream and English mustard. The recipe came into print in 1871, in a popular Russian cookbook, and reached Paris only around 20 years later.

The British won the Battle of Waterloo against Napoleon Bonaparte in June 1815 under the command of Arthur Wellesley, who became the Duke of Wellington and Britain’s greatest military hero. Cooks prepared a national dish in his honor: tender cuts of beef wrapped in mushroom paste and pâté, encased in puff pastry and baked to a crisp, brown finish. It is said that the glossy outer shell was intended to resemble the leather riding boots for which Wellington boots were named, but there is no evidence that was actually the case.

The Battle of Marengo was won by Napoleon Bonaparte against Austria on June 14, 1800, in Piedmont, Italy. Chefs in Paris came up with chicken cooked with garlic, tomatoes, crayfish, and fried eggs, capitalizing on the French sense of nationalism. The dish became known as Chicken Marengo. According to a popular story, François-Claude Dunand was the chef who prepared the meal, using his sword as a knife and the foodstuffs available to him. The only problem is that Dunand was in Moscow during the month of June that year, and he did not enter Napoleon’s service until 1802.

The Prince of Wales, now Edward VII, ate in a café in Monte Carlo, Monaco, in 1895 while 14-year-old Henri Charpentier was flambéing crepes on a table. The liqueur sauce spontaneously ignited. The prince liked the dish and asked that it be named after the woman he was dining with, actress Suzanne Reichenberg. And so, Crêpes Suzette was born. This is the story Charpentier told in his memoir, written decades later.

The Australian soprano Dame Nellie Melba sang Wagner’s Lohengrin at London’s Covent Garden in 1892, prompting her hotel’s head chef, Auguste Escoffier, to create a silver bowl of peaches and vanilla ice cream atop an ice sculpture shaped like a swan, inspired by the opera’s swan boat. Seven years later, at London’s Carlton Hotel, he added raspberry purée and called it Peach Melba. The name has been attached ever since.

Queen Victoria had a sponge cake known as Victoria sponge for afternoon tea most days, usually back at her home on the Isle of Wight. It would have been lighter thanks to an external development: in 1843, chemist Alfred Bird invented modern baking powder, allowing bakers to raise a cake without solely depending on whipping up eggs. Royal bakers would use it to create the two sponge layers filled with raspberry jam and cream and dusted with sugar. This cake never made it off the tea table in Britain.

Gioachino Rossini, the composer behind “The Barber of Seville,” quit composing operas early and spent much of his remaining life looking for good food in Paris. At the Maison Dorée, chef Casimir Moisson constructed a filet mignon on a fried crouton, with foie gras, black truffles, and a Madeira sauce. He did it under Rossini’s supervision. It is said that Rossini instructed an embarrassed Moisson to turn his back, hence the dish’s French name, Tournedos Rossini, though the story is disputed.

Auguste Escoffier, the Savoy Hotel’s head chef, created the royal banquet for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee of 1897. Escoffier knew his queen loved fresh cherries, so he made the dessert from a base of poached dark cherries in sugar syrup, thickened with arrowroot, presented in silver dishes, then flambéed with warmed kirsch, which became known as Cherries Jubilee. He published the recipe six years later.

In April 1864, the Italian general who helped unify Italy, Giuseppe Garibaldi, came to London and was greeted by huge public excitement. Biscuit manufacturer Peek Freans saw an opportunity and created the Garibaldi biscuit, made with a layer of currants pressed between two thin sheets of dough. They sold them as part of the “Garibaldi Mania” promotion, and the people of London called them squashed-fly biscuits. There’s a story that Garibaldi’s troops ate these during their campaigns, but the company has records showing that the biscuit was made for London only and never made it to the battlefield.

Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, a German nobleman, travel writer, and landscape designer who loved ice cream, was a frequent guest of the Prussian royal court in Berlin. His royal court’s head chef, Louis Ferdinand Jungius, built up a molded loaf of three flavors: strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate with crushed macaroons, and named it in honor of the prince in his 1839 cookbook. German folklore says that Pückler created it, but Jungius did, and it is the ancestor of modern Neapolitan ice cream.

German-born Prince Albert was Queen Victoria’s husband from February 1840 and introduced Continental tastes to British royal cuisine. At state banquets for visiting ambassadors, the court chefs in London and Windsor prepared a luxurious dish named Fillet of Beef Prince Albert, which featured tenderloin stuffed with foie gras and black truffles, and cooked in a sauce made from Madeira wine. Even though the dish was named in his honor, there’s no evidence that Prince Albert ever prepared it himself. He was just the inspiration for the recipe.

In 1822, François-René de Chateaubriand, the French writer and diplomat, was serving as ambassador to England, and his chef, Montmireil, wanted to give him a really thick beef tenderloin that would never dry out. He sandwiched the good cut between two cheap “sacrificial” steaks. Then he roasted the lot over very high heat, and when it was done, he discarded the burnt outer layers and gave the perfectly cooked center to his boss. It’s the way people still roast a thick tenderloin today.

Luisa Tetrazzini, the Italian soprano, toured America a great deal and had a fondness for San Francisco. Around 1905, the Palace Hotel’s head chef, Ernest Arbogast, created a baked casserole in her honor called Chicken Tetrazzini. It consisted of diced fowl and mushrooms bound with spaghetti in a sherry-Parmesan cream sauce and topped with breadcrumbs. In 1908, the Knickerbocker Hotel in New York came out with its own version and still claims credit today, though San Francisco’s claim is generally considered the stronger one. The original sauce was made fresh from scratch using real sherry cream.

When Arnold Bennett, author of the acclaimed novel “The Old Wives’ Tale,” stayed at London’s Savoy Hotel in 1929 while working on a new book, the establishment’s chief cook, Jean Baptiste Virlogeux, devised an appropriate evening snack, called Omelette Arnold Bennett. This dish of poached eggs layered with flaked smoked haddock, smothered in Hollandaise sauce infused with cream and Parmesan, and toasted beneath a salamander broiler was so delectable that Bennett requested the same meal whenever he traveled. The Savoy decided to always serve it.

One of the founders of what was eventually called haute cuisine, the French chef Marie-Antoine Carême, who served as personal chef to Tsar Alexander I at the Russian imperial court in Saint Petersburg from around 1815 to 1818, took a simple British baked-apple pudding and turned it cold. He lined a mold with sponge fingers, stuffed it with Bavarian cream, placed it on ice to chill, and finally unmolded it. He named it for his Russian employer: Charlotte Russe.

A Venetian countess, Amalia Nani Mocenigo, one of the regular customers at Harry’s Bar in Venice, was instructed by her physician to shun cooked meat due to anemia. One day in 1950, Giuseppe Cipriani, the bar’s owner, had a creative moment. He sliced chilled raw beef sirloin paper-thin, then added a sauce made of mayonnaise, lemon, and Worcestershire sauce, and served it to Countess Nani. He called it carpaccio, after the paintings of 15th-century Venetian artist Vittore Carpaccio, which were being shown in Venice at the time.

Around 1897, Nellie Melba, the soprano for whom Escoffier had already created a peach dessert, was recovering from illness. She needed light and dry food while convalescing at the Savoy Hotel in London. The head chef at the Savoy, Escoffier, cut bread paper-thin and toasted it, then cut it once more lengthwise and toasted it again until it became very thin and very crisp. Hotelier César Ritz named it for her: Melba Toast. It soon spread far beyond sickrooms, eventually becoming popular around the world.

Dr. James H. Salisbury, a surgeon in the Union Army during the Civil War, was caring for soldiers with chronic diarrhea and digestive problems. He was convinced that starches and vegetables were fermenting toxically in the intestines, and decided to prescribe seasoned minced beef patties as a cure for digestive disease and anemia. They should be eaten three times a day with a cup of hot water. His medical theory died, but his patty, served with gravy, has lived on as Salisbury steak.

This content was created with the help of AI.