Home › Pasta and Rice › Rice with Saffron
Rice with Saffron
(Riso alla Milanese con Zafferano) Wash and dry the rice and put it in boiling broth (beef or chicken broth). When the rice is half cooked add half its weight of marrow of beef bone, cut into small pieces. A few minutes are sufficient for the cooking of the marrow.
Add grated cheese and remove the kettle from the fire.
Dissolve some saffron in one or two tablespoonfuls of broth; sift it through a sieve and mix with rice, which is to be served very hot, and makes an excellent soup. 27
This is risotto alla Milanese in an older, looser form — closer to a soupy rice in broth than the tight, stirred risotto of modern restaurant practice. The saffron infusion at the end is the hinge; everything else is straightforward.
- Saffron handlingSteep the threads in a spoonful or two of hot broth for at least ten minutes before straining them in, and add the liquid off the heat as directed. Saffron dropped dry into a boiling pot gives colour but loses much of its aroma, and prolonged boiling turns it faintly bitter.
- RiceUse a starchy Italian medium-grain rice — Carnaroli, Arborio or Vialone Nano. Long-grain or converted rice will not release the starch that makes this creamy, and "wash and dry the rice" would strip what starch there is; a rinse is optional at best with modern packaged rice.
- Broth quantityNone is given. For a soupy result in the spirit of the original, plan on about 5 cups of broth per cup of rice; for something thicker, closer to 4. The rice wants 16 to 18 minutes at a bare simmer.
- "Kettle"A wide, heavy saucepan, not a tea kettle. The word simply meant a deep cooking pot in the period.
- Beef marrowHalf the rice's weight is a great deal by current taste — roughly 3 to 4 oz of marrow per cup of dry rice. Ask a butcher for split marrow bones and scoop the marrow out, or buy it cut; a third of that amount gives plenty of richness. It melts almost on contact with hot broth, so the recipe is right that a few minutes suffice.
- CheeseGrated Parmigiano-Reggiano. The recipe stirs it in and then removes the pot; taking the pot off first helps it emulsify rather than string. About 1/2 cup per cup of dry rice. Salt only after the cheese goes in — broth plus Parmesan is often salty enough.
- What is missing by modern habitThere is no butter, onion, or wine here, and the rice is never toasted in fat; marrow and cheese do all the enriching. That makes this an unusually spare version — other nineteenth-century Milanese recipes do include butter and onion — and adding a soffritto gives a different, denser dish.
- Yield and servingA cup of dry rice prepared this way serves three as a first course. Serve it immediately in warmed bowls; it thickens and dulls within minutes of leaving the pot.
Riso alla Milanese carries saffron and marrow together, and the marrow is worth noting: the fat comes from the beef bone, the same bone that gave the broth. This version, printed in Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (New York, 1919), is aimed at American households learning Italian cooking from a small English-language manual, and it ends by calling the result "an excellent soup" u2014 the loose, brothy consistency Italians call all'onda, wavelike. The often-repeated story that the yellow colour began with a workman tinting rice with the saffron used to gild the windows of Milan's Duomo is traditional lore rather than documented history; what is documented is that saffron was cultivated and traded in Italy from the late Middle Ages and was long valued as much for its colour, and its supposed medicinal warmth, as for its flavour.