Home › Rice, Etc. › Risotto with Ham
Risotto with Ham
Cut into small pieces one ounce of raw ham, fat and lean. Chop up fine a small piece of onion, and put it with the ham into a frying-pan with one-half a table-spoon of butter. Fry slowly until the ham and onions are golden. Then add one-half cup of uncooked rice; when it has cooked for a few minutes, add twice its height of bouillon (or water), salt and pepper, a dash of nutmeg, and mix well and allow it to boil for twenty minutes over a good fire. Then take off the stove, add two tablespoons of butter and two tablespoons of Parmesan cheese grated; mix well and serve.
A single-serving risotto from an era before the constant-stirring, ladle-by-ladle method became the standard. Read it as written and it works, but it behaves more like a pilaf than a modern risotto.
- "Twice its height of bouillon"Measure by depth in the pan, not by volume: pour in stock until it stands twice as deep as the rice. For half a cup of rice in a small pan that comes to roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups of liquid, and you may need a splash more toward the end if the grains are still chalky.
- Raw hamIn an Italian book this most likely renders prosciutto crudo, uncooked cured ham rather than fresh pork. One ounce, fat and lean, is a slice or two; the fat is what carries the flavour into the butter, so do not trim it.
- Rice to useThe recipe says only 'rice'; for this style use an Italian short-grain or medium-grain risotto rice. Arborio, Carnaroli or Vialone Nano all suit it, though the last two are modern varieties. Long-grain rice will not release the starch that thickens the dish.
- "A good fire"The text asks for a full boil, but a brisk simmer over roughly medium heat is safer; twenty minutes at a hard rolling boil will blow the grains apart before the centres soften, so check at fifteen.
- The finish is the pointOff the heat, the two tablespoons of butter and the Parmesan are beaten in vigorously — the step Italians call mantecatura. It is what turns absorbed stock into a creamy sauce. Adding them over heat, or stirring them in half-heartedly, gives a greasy rather than a glossy result.
- SaltCured ham, bouillon and Parmesan are all salty. Season lightly at the start and correct only after the cheese has gone in.
- Nutmeg"A dash" means a few scrapes of a whole nutmeg. It is a traditional northern Italian seasoning with butter and cheese, and it turns acrid quickly if overdone.
- YieldHalf a cup of raw rice serves one generously or two as a small first course. The proportions scale directly; the liquid-by-depth rule still holds if you keep to a pan of sensible size.
Simple Italian Cookery belongs to a wave of early twentieth-century books that introduced American households to Italian home cooking in small, unintimidating portions — note that this recipe is sized for one person and calls for a single ounce of ham. Risotto is a northern Italian dish, built on the rice grown in the irrigated plains of Lombardy and Piedmont, where cultivation has been documented since the fifteenth century; the combination of butter, onion, broth and grated Parmesan is the standard base onto which regional versions graft saffron, mushrooms, seafood or, as here, cured ham. The one-shot method given here, with the liquid added all at once and measured by its depth over the rice, appears in older Italian household books; the modern insistence on adding hot broth a ladle at a time with continuous stirring became the accepted technique in restaurant and cookbook practice later.