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January 25
Menu: Sardines on Toast, Caper Sauce; Risotto; Peas; Fried Canned Tomatoes; Lettuce and Hard-Cooked Eggs; Jellied Prunes; Whipped Cream; Gold Cake; Coffee Risotto-12 pound rice, 1 small onion, 4 tablespoons Crisco, 1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese, 1/2 pint tomato sauce, about 1 pint good stock, salt, pepper, nutmeg, and 1/2 teaspoon saffron. Wash rice in several courses of water, drain and dry. Peel and chop onion. Melt Crisco in stewpan; when hot add onion, fry over gentle fire until light fawn color, then add rice; shake pan over fire for a few minutes, so as to fry rice a little. Next add seasoning, salt, pepper, nutmeg, and saffron; moisten with little stock, and add more as rice begins to swell. When stock is used up, gradually add sauce. When rice is tender mix in grated cheese. It is then ready to serve. In preparing this dish remember that rice should be well done, and should be neither too dry nor too moist.
A straightforward Milanese-style risotto from Crisco's promotional calendar of dinners, with two typographical casualties worth sorting out before you start.
- The rice quantity"12 pound rice" is a printer's mangling of 1/2 pound, which is the amount the rest of the recipe supports — roughly 1 heaping cup, serving three or four. Twelve pounds of rice would need several gallons of liquid and a vat.
- The title"Coffee" belongs to the surrounding menu for January 26, not to this dish. The risotto was one course in a printed day's dinner; the heading has drifted.
- Crisco stands in for butterThe whole point of the book is to sell hydrogenated shortening, so butter and lard were displaced wherever possible. Four tablespoons of butter, or half butter and half olive oil, gives a far better risotto and is what the dish traditionally uses.
- Do not wash the riceRinsing "in several courses of water" and drying strips the surface starch that makes risotto creamy. Use unwashed arborio, carnaroli or vialone nano and skip that step entirely.
- Liquid, added hotAbout a pint of stock plus half a pint of tomato sauce for half a pound of rice works out at roughly three cups of liquid to a cup of rice. Keep both at a simmer in a separate pan; cold liquid stalls the cooking and makes the grains cook unevenly.
- SaffronHalf a teaspoon of saffron threads is generous by current prices and practice; a large pinch, steeped in a few tablespoons of the hot stock, is plenty. Add the infusion partway through rather than dry with the other seasonings, so the color and aroma survive.
- "Gentle fire" and "light fawn color"Medium-low heat, and the onion should be soft and barely golden, not browned. Then toast the rice for two to three minutes until the grains look translucent at the edges.
- Timing and textureExpect 18 to 20 minutes of stirring in liquid from the first ladleful. The instruction that the rice be "neither too dry nor too moist" is the hinge: it should slump slowly when spooned onto a plate, and the cheese goes in off the heat so it emulsifies rather than strings.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was Procter & Gamble's book-length advertisement for its new hydrogenated cottonseed shortening; a companion Crisco volume, A Calendar of Dinners, assigned a menu to days of the year — partly to demonstrate that the fat could replace butter and lard in any course. The saffron-and-Parmesan version here is risotto alla milanese in outline, though the tomato sauce is a departure from the Milanese original, which is usually built on marrow and stock alone. The insistence that the rice be "well done" fits the era's general preference for thoroughly cooked food; al dente as a stated virtue reached English-language cookbooks considerably later.