Penne alla vodka () is a pasta dish made primarily with vodka and penne pasta (or similar shapes such as rigatoni), usually accompanied with heavy cream, crushed tomatoes or tomato sauce, onions, and sometimes small meats and vegetables like sausage, pancetta or peas. The pure alcohol apparently helps intensify and accentuate flavors in the dish, among other claims. The recipe became very popular in Italy and in the United States around the 1980s, when it was offered to discotheque customers. The recipe thus became an icon of the fashionable cuisine of the time, which preferred the use of cream in first courses. Penne alla vodka remains popular in Italian-American cuisine. Origins The exact origins of penne alla vodka are unclear, and to some extent the subject of urban legend and folklore. The first use of vodka in a pasta dish is attested to in 1974, when the Italian actor Ugo Tognazzi published the cookbook L'Abbuffone (means "the bouffe-men", named after Tognazzi's movie La Grande Bouffe), which included his recipe of pasta all'infuriata ('furious pasta'), described as a sort of pasta all'arrabbiata, made with ½ kg of penne, ½ kg of fresh peeled tomatoes, a shot of vodka, chili pepper, oil, garlic, and bay leaves. Tognazzi suggested also that, if using a Polish vodka with chilli ("formidable, tremendous, very strong, very hot, deadly"), the fresh chilli pepper can be omitted. There have been multiple, often conflicting, claims to the invention and history of the dish; one author claims that it was invented at Dante, a restaurant in Bologna. One cookbook claims that it was invented in the 1980s by a Roman chef for a vodka company that wanted to popularize its product in Italy. The dish may have been common in Italy before becoming popular in America in the early 1980s. In the 1980s, another recipe based on penne and vodka, called penne alla moscovita (penne on Moscow style), but made with smoked salmon, cream and caviar (or variant with cream and shrimp), became very popular. Because of the particularity and novelty of the recipe compared to traditional Italian cuisine, it was widespread in the discos of the Emilia-Romagna Riviera with the generic name of "penne alla vodka". On October 25, 2016, the Italian Association of Confectionery and Pasta Industries rediscovered this recipe from the 1980s, proposing it again on the occasion of the 18th edition of the World Pasta Day