No. 739

Piedmontese Risot Garnishing

Garniture de Risot Piemontaise

Risot can be employed either as a soup or a garnishing; the manner to prepare it is most simple. Put into a saucepan two spoonfuls of chopped up onion, let if fry to a nice golden color in some butter, and add to it a pint of clean but unwashed Piedmont rice; cook it for two minutes while stirring, and then moisten with three pints of broth, cook it again for twenty minutes without touching it; by this time the rice ought not to be too much done, but the liquid nearly all absorbed; remove it from the fire, and finish simply by incorporating into it about a quarter of a pound of good butter, a very little at the time, using a two pronged fork (Fig. 175) for stirring, and two handfuls of grated parmesan cheese, also some cayenne pepper. If the rice be of good quality and properly cooked, it requires no further seasoning; cover it for five or six minutes, and then dress it in a vegetable dish, and dredge over some more parmesan. Risot prepared in this way may be placed in large timbale molds, or else in a border mold, first brushing the inside over with some melted glaze. If desired the cheese may be served separately instead of mixed with the rice.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's risot is not the stirred, coaxed risotto of modern restaurant practice — it is closer to a pilaf, left alone for twenty minutes and enriched with butter and cheese only at the end. The finish off the heat is the whole point.

The hinge: butter off the firePull the pan from the heat before the butter goes in, and add it in small pieces, stirring hard so it emulsifies rather than melting into grease. This is mantecatura; done over direct heat the butter separates and the grains turn oily.
MeasuresA pint of rice is 2 cups, about 14 oz. Three pints of broth is 6 cups. A quarter pound of butter is 1 stick (4 oz). "Two handfuls" of grated parmesan is genuinely imprecise — reckon on 1 to 1½ cups, and taste.
Piedmont riceAny short-grain Italian risotto rice: Carnaroli, Vialone Nano or Arborio. Long-grain will not give the starch that binds the finished dish.
"Clean but unwashed"Do not rinse. The surface starch is what thickens the liquid and lets the butter and cheese bind. Pick over the rice instead.
Twenty minutes without touchingKeep it at the barest simmer, covered if your burner runs hot. The instruction not to stir is deliberate and worth following — this method depends on the rice steaming in a fixed quantity of liquid.
SeasoningRanhofer assumes a well-made, lightly salted broth and adds no salt at all. Modern commercial stock is often already salty, and a cup of parmesan brings more; season at the very end, after the cheese.
Glaze for the molds"Melted glaze" is glace de viande — meat stock reduced to a syrup. Brushing it inside a timbale or border mold both greases the mold and colors the turned-out rice. Softened butter works if you have no glaze, though you lose the gloss.
YieldAbout 6 cups cooked, which serves eight as a garnish beside a roast or four to six as a dish in its own right. Serve it at once; molded risot sets firm and stiffens further as it cools.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry sits in the chapter of garnishings — components meant to be dressed around a roast or piled into a mold, not served as a course. That placement explains the odd framing of a dish Americans now think of as a main: in the grand French service Ranhofer worked in, rice cooked with onion, butter and parmesan was accompaniment. The name points to Piedmont, where rice has been grown in the flooded plains of the Po valley since the fifteenth century and where risotto with butter and cheese is the regional baseline; "Piedmont rice" is often said to have been a way the short-grain Italian varieties were sold in American and English markets of the period, before Arborio and Carnaroli became household names. The spelling risot, with the Italian double consonant dropped and the final vowel gone, appears to be a Frenchified form of the kind found in nineteenth-century professional cookbooks, which routinely absorbed Italian dishes through a French kitchen vocabulary.