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Rice with Butter and Cheese (Riso in Bianco)
Take one-half cup of rice. Boil in salted water. After twenty minutes of boiling take off the fire and drain. Then put the rice back into a saucepan with three tablespoons of grated cheese (Parmesan) and three tablespoons of butter. Mix well and serve as an entree, or around a plate of meat.
A two-ingredient finish over plain boiled rice, and the whole dish turns on how the butter and cheese are worked in. The proportions are generous by modern habit and the boiling time belongs to an older, harder rice.
- Off the heat, and quicklyReturn the drained rice to the warm pan away from the burner and beat in the butter and cheese while everything is still hot. Over direct heat the butter is more likely to separate and the cheese to clump; the point is a creamy coating, not a sauce.
- Twenty minutes is too long nowTwenty minutes is long now -- Italian medium-grain rice sold today (arborio, carnaroli, vialone nano) is generally done in about 15 to 18 minutes at a boil, so twenty can take it past a firm grain. Start tasting early and drain while there is still a slight bite.
- Which riceUse an Italian risotto rice rather than long-grain or parboiled. The surface starch is what lets the butter and cheese cling, and converted rice will not give it.
- Do not rinseRinsing before or after boiling washes away the starch this dish depends on. Drain in a sieve and give it a moment to steam off, no more.
- CheeseReal Parmigiano-Reggiano or Grana Padano, grated fine on the day. Pre-grated cheese carries anti-caking starch and refuses to melt smoothly.
- Proportions and yieldHalf a cup of raw rice is about 100 g, roughly two side portions. Three tablespoons each of butter and cheese to that quantity is very rich; two of each gives a lighter result, and salt the boiling water well since nothing else seasons it.
- "Entree" hereIn older cookery books entree often meant a course served on its own before the roast rather than the main event. Serve it in a warm shallow bowl, or spooned around a platter of roast or braised meat as the recipe suggests.
Riso in bianco — literally rice "in white," meaning without tomato or sauce — is the plainest thing in the Italian rice repertoire and is commonly the dish given to anyone who is unwell or off rich food. It sits at the far end of the same technique as risotto: the mantecatura, the beating in of cold butter and grated cheese at the end, is what makes both creamy, though here the rice is simply boiled and drained rather than cooked slowly in broth. Rice has been grown in the Po valley since the fifteenth century, which is part of why northern Italian cooking treats it as a first course in its own right while the south leans on pasta.