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Rice With Mushrooms
10 mushrooms if canned, or 5 or 6 if fresh ones 3/4 of a cup of rice Chop up a little onion, parsley, celery, and carrot together, and put them on the fire with two tablespoons of good olive-oil. When this sauce is colored, add tow tablespoons of tomato paste, thinned with hot water (or a corresponding quantity of tomato sauce). Season with salt and pepper. Cut the mush-rooms into small pieces, and add them to the sauce. Cook for twenty minutes over a medium fire. Put on one side and prepare the rice as follows: Fry the rice with a lump of butter until dry; then add hot water, a little at a time, and boil gently. When the rice is half cooked (after about ten minutes) add the mushrooms and sauce, and cook for another ten minutes. Add grated Parmesan cheese before serving.
This is a risotto in all but name, written for cooks who had no word for it in English. The method — toast the rice in fat, add hot liquid a little at a time — is the whole point, and it still works exactly as described.
- The hinge: hot liquid, added graduallyCold liquid stalls the grains and makes the starch release unevenly. Keep the water or broth at a bare simmer in a second pan and ladle it in, letting each addition be nearly absorbed before the next.
- Which riceThe recipe does not say which rice, but the method points to an Italian short-grain. Modern arborio, carnaroli or vialone nano all work; long-grain rice will not give the creamy body the method is after and will simply go soft.
- Water is a floor, not a ceilingThe original calls for plain hot water. Light chicken or mushroom broth gives a markedly better result and costs nothing extra in effort.
- The soffrittoOnion, parsley, celery and carrot chopped fine is a standard Italian battuto. "When this sauce is colored" means softened and lightly golden, roughly 8–10 minutes over medium heat, not browned.
- Tomato pasteTwo tablespoons of modern double-concentrate paste loosened with a few tablespoons of hot water is close enough; taste before adding more. The recipe also allows a corresponding quantity of tomato sauce instead.
- MushroomsThe recipe offers canned or fresh, asking for 10 canned against 5 or 6 fresh. With fresh cremini or button mushrooms, 5 or 6 large ones is about 6 oz; sauté out their water before they go into the tomato so the sauce does not turn thin.
- TimingThe recipe gives ten minutes before the mushrooms go in and ten after, twenty in all, which is about right; expect 18–22 minutes from the first ladle of liquid, and judge by bite rather than by clock — the grain should be firm at the centre but not chalky.
- YieldThree-quarters of a cup of raw rice serves two as a first course, one as a main. Scale up by roughly 1/3 cup of rice per additional person and increase the liquid, not the sauce, in proportion.
- The typo"Tow tablespoons of tomato paste" is a printer's error for two.
Simple Italian Cookery (1912) was written by Antonia Isola — the pen name of Mabel Earl McGinnis, an American who had lived in Italy — and it belongs to the first wave of books trying to explain Italian home cooking to English-speaking households in plain terms. That project may explain why the word risotto does not appear in this recipe: the technique is described step by step rather than named. Rice cookery of this kind is northern Italian, tied to the paddy fields of the Po valley around Vercelli and Pavia, and the pairing with mushrooms and a little tomato is ordinary domestic fare rather than restaurant cooking. The instruction to thin tomato paste with hot water would suit a kitchen stocked with conserva, the dark concentrated tomato paste of the period.