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Risotto
This is an elegant Italian dish, the principal ingredient of which is rice. Shred onions into a frying-pan with plenty of butter, and fry till the onions become very brown and communicate their colour to the butter. Run the butter off, and add to this some rich broth, slightly flavoured with saffron; thicken the whole with well-boiled rice, and serve up as a pottage, instead of soup, at the beginning of dinner.
This is risotto as a Victorian English kitchen understood it — closer to a saffron rice soup than the creamy, stirred dish of modern Italian cooking. The instructions are terse, so a few decisions are left to the cook.
- The hinge: the onion butterEverything depends on frying the onion in generous butter until deeply browned so the fat takes on colour and sweetness. Then the butter is poured off and used as the flavour base; the onion solids are discarded. Keep the heat moderate so the milk solids in the butter do not scorch and turn bitter.
- QuantitiesNone are given. For four servings as a first course, work with about 2 medium onions, 4 oz (115 g) butter, 1½ pints (about 750 ml) good broth and 6 oz (170 g) rice measured raw.
- Saffron"Slightly flavoured" means a small pinch — 15 to 20 threads — steeped in a little hot broth for ten minutes before it goes in. Saffron sold ready-ground is more easily adulterated; threads are safer.
- "Rich broth"A well-reduced veal or chicken stock, unsalted or lightly salted so it can be reduced further. Modern cubes and cartons are salty and thin; if using them, dilute and taste before seasoning.
- The rice"Well-boiled rice" here is rice cooked separately and soft, not risotto rice toasted in fat and fed with stock. A short-grain rice such as arborio or carnaroli, boiled until it breaks down slightly, gives the body the recipe wants; long-grain stays too separate to thicken.
- ConsistencyIt should pour but coat the spoon — a pottage, not a pilaf. Add the rice in stages and stop when it mounds slightly on the spoon, then let it sit off the heat for five minutes, as it thickens further as it cools.
- Yield and serviceServes four as a soup course. Grated Parmesan and a little more butter stirred in at the end are consistent with the dish, though the original does not call for them.
Cassell's places risotto among "elegant Italian" dishes, and the result is a hybrid: the saffron and onion butter belong recognisably to Milanese risotto alla milanese, but the method — mix broth with it and serve it as a pottage before dinner — is squarely English soup-making. The word risotto is formed from riso, rice, and the saffron-and-butter version is generally traced to Lombardy, where rice has been grown in the flooded plains of the Po valley since the fifteenth century. The instruction to serve it "instead of soup, at the beginning of dinner" reflects the fixed course order of the late-Victorian table.