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Risotto
1/2 pound rice, 1 small onion, 4 tablespoons Crisco, 1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese, 1/2 pint tomato sauce, about 1 pint good stock, salt, pepper, nutmeg, and 1/2 teaspoon saffron.
Wash rice in several courses of water, drain and dry. Peel and chop onion. Melt Crisco in stewpan; when hot add onion, fry over gentle fire until light fawn color, then add rice; shake pan over fire for a few minutes, so as to fry rice a little. Next add seasoning, salt, pepper, nutmeg, and saffron; moisten with little stock, and add more as rice begins to swell. When stock is used up, gradually add sauce. When rice is tender mix in grated cheese. It is then ready to serve. In preparing this dish remember that rice should be well done, and should be neither too dry nor too moist.
A straightforward saffron-and-tomato risotto from a Crisco-sponsored menu book, written before Italian rice varieties were widely sold in America. Two things need attention: the shortening and the instruction to wash the rice.
- CriscoFour tablespoons of hydrogenated vegetable shortening was the sponsor's product, not a culinary choice. Butter, olive oil, or a mix of the two gives the flavor the dish expects.
- Washing the riceModern risotto technique deliberately keeps the surface starch, since that starch is what makes the finished dish creamy. Washing and drying will give you a looser, more pilaf-like result; skip it if you want the creamy texture you know from restaurants.
- Which riceThe book most likely means plain long or medium grain rice. Arborio, carnaroli, or vialone nano behave differently and will take somewhat more liquid — add hot stock or water as needed.
- MeasuresHalf a pound of rice is about 1 1/4 cups. Half a pint of tomato sauce is 1 cup; a pint of stock is 2 cups. With ordinary rice that liquid total is about right; taste and add hot water if it stiffens before the grains are tender.
- SaffronHalf a teaspoon of saffron threads is a lot by modern prices and palates. A generous pinch, crumbled and steeped in a few tablespoons of the hot stock, colors and flavors the whole pan.
- Keep the liquid hotAdd stock and sauce hot, a ladle at a time, stirring. Cold liquid stalls the cooking and gives you unevenly done grains.
- The tomato goes in lastThe order matters, and it is the order the recipe gives: stock first, tomato sauce at the end. Acid is generally held to slow the softening of rice, so tomato added early can leave the centers firm.
- YieldServes four as a first course or side, two or three as a main. Serve immediately — it firms up as it sits.
This comes from an American menu book underwritten by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which explains why a vegetable shortening stands in for the butter an Italian cook would have used. The dish itself is the northern Italian standard — risotto alla milanese in its saffron form, here crossed with tomato — and it reached American cookbooks in the wake of large-scale Italian immigration in the decades around 1900. The care taken to explain that the rice "should be neither too dry nor too moist" suggests the author expected readers with little or no experience of risotto.