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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 color to the butter. Run the butter off, and add to this some rich broth, slightly flavored 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 a Victorian English reading of risotto alla milanese rather than the Italian method: the rice is boiled separately and stirred into a saffron broth at the end, giving something closer to a thick soup. Taken on its own terms it works, provided the onions are browned properly.
- The hinge: brown the onions slowlyThe whole flavour of the dish comes from onions cooked in butter until deeply browned and the butter itself has coloured. That is 25-40 minutes over moderate heat, not a quick fry, and it will scorch if rushed.
- "Run the butter off"The phrase is ambiguous. The likeliest reading is that the coloured butter is poured off the onion shreds and used as the base of the broth, but it could equally mean draining away surplus fat. On the first reading the onions can be discarded, or stirred back in if you would rather not waste them.
- Quantities, which the original omitsFor four servings: 2 large onions, 4 oz (110 g) butter, about 1 1/2 pints (850 ml) good chicken or beef broth, and 6 oz (170 g) rice weighed raw. The broth quantity is a judgement call, since the recipe only asks that the result be thick enough to eat as a pottage.
- Saffron"Slightly flavored" means a generous pinch, 15-20 threads, steeped in a few spoonfuls of the hot broth for ten minutes before it goes in. Saffron powder is often adulterated; threads are more reliable.
- "Well-boiled rice"A short or medium grain rice, cooked soft in salted water and drained, is what is wanted here, since it has to thicken the broth. Long-grain rice stays separate and gives a thin result. Modern arborio or carnaroli will work, though cooked this way it will not have the creamy bind of a true risotto.
- "Rich broth"In this period that meant a long-simmered stock with real body. A weak cube-based broth leaves the dish tasting only of butter and saffron; use a well-made stock or reduce a commercial one to concentrate it.
- ServingSent to table as a first course in soup plates, with grated Parmesan alongside if you like. It thickens further as it stands, so hold back a little broth to loosen it.
Saffron rice cooked in broth is the dish Milan claims as its own, risotto alla milanese, and rice has been grown in the flooded fields of the Po valley since the fifteenth century. What appears here is how the dish travelled: English and American compilers of the late nineteenth century knew risotto as an idea, an "elegant Italian dish" of rice, butter and saffron, without the Italian technique of adding hot broth to raw rice a ladleful at a time and stirring until the starch thickens it. Instead the rice is boiled first and used as a thickener, which is why the instruction ends by calling the result a pottage to be served in place of soup.