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Risotto, Piedmontaise
Heat half ounce butter in a saucepan, add one medium, sound, finely chopped onion and gently brown to a golden colour for five minutes, stirring well meanwhile. Then add half pound well-cleaned Italian rice. Stir well with a wooden spoon until the rice has obtained a good golden colour, then gradually moisten with a pint and a half hot broth continually stirring meanwhile. Add one small cervelat sausage, one saltspoon diluted and strained Spanish saffron, one heavy teaspoon slat, half teaspoon white pepper. Mix well, cover the pan, and as soon as it comes to a boil place the pan in a hot oven for thirty minutes. Remove it, take up the cervelat sausage. Add three tablespoons grated Parmesan or Swiss cheese and half ounce good butter; mix well with a wooden spoon for two minutes. Dress the rice on a hot dish. Slice the cervelat into thin slices, arrange them around the rice and serve.
An oven-baked risotto rather than the stirred kind, which makes it far less work than its reputation suggests. A few of the quantities and one badly set word need attention.
- "Italian rice"Use a short-grain risotto rice — Arborio, Carnaroli or Vialone Nano. Long-grain or converted rice will not release the starch that gives the finished dish its body.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. For saffron that is a large amount by weight if you read it as packed threads; measure it loosely, or use a generous pinch steeped in a few tablespoons of the hot broth for ten minutes, then strain the liquid in. That steeping is what "diluted and strained" means.
- "One heavy teaspoon slat"A typesetter's slip for salt. Hold most of it back: the broth, the cervelat and three tablespoons of Parmesan all carry salt, and you can correct at the end.
- Hot ovenRoughly 400-450F. The pan goes in covered and already at a boil, so the oven is mostly holding the heat rather than building it; a heavy lidded casserole or Dutch oven works best.
- Liquid ratioA pint and a half is 3 cups to about 1 1/4 cups of rice — right for a covered oven where nothing evaporates, but check at 20 minutes and add a splash of hot broth if it looks dry.
- CervelatA cooked, finely ground smoked sausage, usually mild; it is more familiar from German, Swiss and French charcuterie counters than Italian ones. A small cooked smoked sausage or a mild kielbasa stands in; it poaches whole in the rice to flavour it, then comes out to be sliced as garnish.
- The finishingThe last step — butter and cheese beaten in off the heat for two minutes — is the mantecatura, and it is what turns baked rice into risotto. Do not skip it or shorten it.
- YieldHalf a pound of rice serves four as a first course, two or three as a main with the sausage.
Rice has been grown on the flooded plains of Piedmont and Lombardy since the fifteenth century, and the paddies around Vercelli and Novara still supply most of Italy's risotto rice. Alexander Filippini, long the chef at Delmonico's in New York, assembled The International Cook Book (1906) as a survey of national cookeries for American kitchens, and his versions tend to be filtered through a French restaurant sensibility: the onion browned in butter, the oven finish, the sausage lifted out and fanned around the mound of rice as a garnish read as restaurant-plate habits rather than domestic Italian ones. The cervelat may point to a kitchen where Swiss or German charcuterie was closer to hand than Italian.