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Risotto with Chicken Giblets
(Risotto alla Milanese II) The broth for this risotto may be made by cooking together the giblets, neck and tips of wings of a chicken which is to be roasted, or it may be made from the left-overs of roast fowl.
Boil the rice until it is about half done in salted water. Then let the water cook away and begin adding the broth, in such quantity that the rice will be nearly dry when it is tender. Fry one chopped onion in the oil or fat. Some mushrooms cut up small are a very good addition to this "Soffritto." Mince the chicken giblets and add to the onion. Stir the mixture into the rice. Add grated cheese and a beaten egg just as the rice is taken from the fire. 24 (Risotto con piselli) Wash and dry 1½ lb. rice; chop fine one medium sized onion and put it on the fire with a small quantity of butter.
When the onion is well browned, add the rice little by little, stirring with a wooden spoon. Add some boiling water one cup at a time. Drain the peas previously prepared (fresh or canned peas may be used) and add them toward the end of the cooking. When the whole is almost cooked, add some salt and take it away from the water almost dry. Add some butter, stir and serve hot. 25
Two recipes run together here, both written for cooks who already knew what a risotto should look like. Neither gives quantities for the first dish, so treat the method as the instruction and scale to appetite.
- Quantities for the giblet risottoThe original names no measure of rice. For four people use about 1½ cups (300 g) risotto rice, roughly 5 cups of giblet broth, one onion, the giblets of one chicken, a handful of grated Parmigiano and one egg.
- The name is misleadingThis is called alla Milanese but contains no saffron, which is the defining element of the Milanese dish; here the term seems to mean little more than a risotto cooked in broth. Add a good pinch of saffron steeped in warm broth if you want the dish the name promises.
- Rice to useArborio, Carnaroli or Vialone Nano. Long-grain rice will not release the starch that makes the finished dish creamy rather than merely wet.
- The half-boiling stepStarting the rice in salted water and letting it cook dry before switching to broth reads as a way of stretching a small quantity of giblet stock. It works, but the modern route of toasting the rice in the soffritto and adding broth a ladle at a time gives better texture.
- GibletsHearts and gizzards need long simmering and are best sliced thin after cooking; the liver is tender in minutes and turns grainy if boiled with the rest. Simmer heart, gizzard, neck and wing tips for the broth, and cook the liver briefly in the soffritto instead.
- The eggBeat it with the cheese and stir it in off the heat, as written. The residual heat of the rice sets it into a sauce; over direct flame it scrambles.
- Yield of the pea risotto1½ lb of rice is a very large batch — something like ten to twelve servings. Halve or quarter it. Fresh peas want six to eight minutes, canned peas only a minute or two to heat through, so add them accordingly rather than by the clock.
- "Well browned" onionTake this as deep golden, not dark. A scorched soffritto carries a bitterness through the whole pot, and there is nothing else in the pea risotto to hide behind.
- FinishingThe final butter stirred into the near-dry rice is the mantecatura. Use cold butter, beat it in vigorously off the heat, and serve at once; risotto stiffens within minutes.
The Italian Cook Book belongs to a wave of early twentieth-century American volumes that introduced regional Italian cooking to English-speaking households, and its risotto recipes show the northern Italian method: rice cooked in broth, stirred, and enriched at the end rather than boiled and drained. Rice has been grown in the Po valley since the fifteenth century, and risotto is a Lombard and Piedmontese dish rather than a national one. The giblet version here is frugal cooking of the kind found in any farmhouse, using the parts of a bird already destined for the roasting pan, simmered into broth so nothing is wasted. That the book calls it alla Milanese without saffron is worth noting, since saffron is the ingredient most associated with the name.