The Secret History of Risotto

In the autumn of 1984, my parents and I paid our first visit to Venice. They flew, and I joined them there, having gone happily astray on European trains in the preceding fortnight, arriving at Santa Lucia station in a dawn that appeared to be steeped in mother-of-pearl. One day, we took a boat to the island of Burano, three-quarters of an hour from the city’s heart, and lunched at the Trattoria da Romano. Ordering at random from the menu, I chose risotto, and, after a puzzling delay, it was placed before me. Off-white, unobtrusive, and modestly freckled with parsley, it was as plain to the eye as it was revolutionary to the palate. Never had I tasted such a thing. The flavor, far from strong, was mysterious and mild. As a young fool, recently graduated from college, I neglected to ask how, or of what, the risotto was made. Instead, I feasted, almost cracking the plate with my scraping, and silently vowed that I would try to re-create such food—or a ghost of it, however dissatisfying—for the rest of my life. I would wander the earth, seeking out one risotto after another, in search of the ideal. Forty years later, the folly has worsened, and the quest goes on.

The good news is that making risotto is a breeze. The fundamental things apply. You melt a bit of butter, sauté some chopped onion, add rice, stir it around, add wine, stir, then add hot stock, ladle by ladle, while you stir and stir again. Remove the pan from the heat. Throw in grated Parmesan and more butter. Stir. Wait. Serve. Eat. Feel your immortal soul being warmed and suffused with pleasures both rare and immeasurable. Lick the spoon. Wash the pan. Done.

The Food Scene

Helen Rosner on what, where, and how to eat.

On inspection, however, the fundamentals melt away. This is where trouble starts. Some recipes are onion-free. Others drop the wine. As for the dairy products, they ought to be non-negotiable, and I was once advised never to order risotto south of Rome, because that is where butter country peters out. To anyone who can’t or won’t eat anything predicated on the existence of a cow, risotto should surely be off limits. Or so I believed until I met an experimentalist chef, a few years ago, who argued that, when we praise the creaminess of a risotto, all we are really doing is confirming the omnipresence of butter and cheese. His dream was to create a risotto using nothing but stock and rice. Trapped within each grain, he told me, and secretly waiting to be released, was all the texture we would ever need.

Risotto, in other words, is governed by a set of laws that are rooted in tradition, rich in common sense, and aching to be broken or bent. These include:

1. The finest rice is grown in the Po River Valley. There are varieties other than Carnaroli, Arborio, and Vialone Nano, but stick to those—and quibble fervently, by all means, as to which of them is most suited to which particular risotto—and you won’t go far off track.

2. “Nothing in a risotto should be larger than a grain of rice.” So I was told, albeit “with slight exaggeration,” by Ruth Rogers, the co-founder of the River Café, which has been serving the most desirable Italian food in London since 1987. “If you want rice with big pieces in it, have a paella,” she said. The actual process of cooking risotto—“so focussed and so calming”—is part of the appeal and, rice being gluten-free, the outcome is seldom heavy. “I feel better after a plate of risotto than I do after pasta,” Rogers said.

3. Risotto will usually be listed on menus among the primi piatti; that is, as a first course. You should, in principle, be served antipasti and then risotto, followed by a main course, probably of meat or fish. (In the 1996 movie “Big Night,” the clueless customer who orders risotto with spaghetti on the side—starch plus starch—reduces the chef to rage.) Such a procedure can be tough going, it must be said, on the schedules, wallets, and intestines of people who, for whatever reason, can’t hack a two-hour lunch. Recently, in Verona, I revelled in a risotto with anchovies, capers, lemon, and toasted pine nuts, only to cause grave disappointment in my waiter by not moving on to the specialty of the house, pastissada de caval con polenta morbida. Or, in plain English, horse.

4. Risotto is not for the swift. The patiently phased addition of the stock, lasting seventeen minutes or so, cannot be rushed. In a restaurant, therefore, raise a quizzical eyebrow at any risotto that reaches the table in less than twenty-five minutes. That means it has been sitting around, awaiting liftoff, and surreptitiously reheated.

5. Make it at home if you can, in line with the rhythms of a working kitchen. This will insure a steady supply of brodo, the stock without which your risotto will have no meaning. Having roasted a chicken on Sunday, say, I tend to spend Monday in vulture mode—circling the remains, descending to pick at the cold carcass for scraps of meat, and seeing off other scavengers with a cruel eye. On Tuesday, I cover the bones with water, add the requisite vegetables, bring everything to a boil, simmer, and skim. Enter the rice. A substantial meal is thereby generated from almost nothing, with no waste. Risotto, among its many other virtues, is cheap.

If you can’t be bothered to cook risotto, do not despair. You can read all about it. Now and then, culinary writing threatens to become a branch of moral philosophy, and a severe one at that; recipes showing what you should do are overshadowed by grim-visaged warnings about what you should not. This is true of baking, and even more so of risotto. The queen of interdiction, as of much else, is Elizabeth David, whose “Italian Food,” first published in 1954, is a banquet of bans and commands, steering us toward the correct strains of rice, “for which there is no, repeat no, substitute.” An imperious, not to say Napoleonic, hand is waved at the map of Europe:

In a good and conscientious restaurant, say in Milan or Venice or Turin, you must wait for your risotto just as in a French restaurant you would expect to wait for your soufflé. (Don’t, by the way, look for good risotti in Florence and Tuscany. Tuscan cooks, at any rate in my experience, don’t know how to make a correct risotto any more than do French or English ones.)

On the subject of risi e bisi, a comforting Venetian hodgepodge of rice and peas, David, in a blizzard of negatives, writes, “It should not be stirred too much or the peas will break. It is to be eaten, however, with a fork, not a spoon, so it must not be too soupy.” The same dish compels another writer, Marcella Hazan, to take an ethical stand. With a wag of the finger, she alerts us to the consequences of picking the wrong pea: “You may use frozen peas, if you must, and this recipe shows you how, but until you have made it with choice fresh peas your risi e bisi will be a tolerable but slightly blurred copy of the original.”

It is Hazan whose books on Italian cookery are the ones to which I have clung for decades, and whose recipe for risotto is a matchless fusion of the preacherly and the poetic. “You must be steadfast and tireless in your stirring,” she proclaims, before descending from the pulpit and adding a note of caution: “Do not ‘drown’ the rice.” What matters at the end, we learn, is to bring the risotto “to its final tender but firm-to-the-bite stage so that it is creamy but not saturated.” Thus, with rapped knuckles and a watering mouth, we set about following orders.

The word for the fifth-act climax of risotto—the scene in which the butter (preferably cold, from the fridge) and the Parmesan are brought onstage and obliged to mingle with the other characters—is mantecatura. Though mellifluous to the ear, it’s not exclusive; you can apply it to pasta as well. The phrase that is used for risotto, and risotto alone, is all’onda, or like a wave. It describes the motion of the rice in the pan as it laps at the brink of readiness. Is there a more beautiful encounter between language and food? All too often, the words that emerge from our lips are no match for the deliciousness that goes in. You may be partial to German garlic sausage, but requesting Knackwurst mit Knoblauch somehow murders the appetite before the first munch. Risotto cooks, on the other hand, wielding their spoons like conductors’ batons, are free to make music at the stove, taking their cue from “The Winter’s Tale”:

When you do dance, I wish you
A wave o’ th’ sea, that you might ever do
Nothing but that; move still, still so,
And own no other function.

And that’s the point. A good risotto has no other function. If you want to be mean, you could argue that it’s nothing more than grownup baby food. But what’s wrong with that? As simple as the bowl of mush in “Goodnight Moon,” it nourishes, consoles, and makes lenient demands on the digestion. To the infant eye, it may resemble oatmeal, but its savor surpasses the bland and puritanical thud of porridge. The growing child is cheered, not merely filled, by a dose of risotto. A British company called Ella’s Kitchen makes a salmon risotto for apprentice chewers aged ten months and up. It comes in a handy sachet, from which the contents must be squeezed. The ingredients, organic to a fault, read like a proto-induction into the proudly wholesome appetites of the bourgeoisie. Hey, it’s never too soon to start your kids on dill! I tried a smear or two of Ella’s concoction; not to be indelicate, but it doesn’t look that different from what comes out the other end of a baby. The risotto is not too yucky, though, and I would have polished off the whole sachet if I’d remembered to wear a bib.

The elderly, likewise, are a target audience for risotto, as their powers of mastication decline. Long after they’ve given up shrimp tempura and locked their jaws on one last bar of NutRageous, they and their vulnerable gums should still be able to cope with risotto al dente. That celebrated phrase refers to the state—not much longer than a moment—at which the dish is done. Until then, the rice is crunchy; afterward, it’s gloop. But how, precisely, do you test for such consummation? The best answer I’ve received was a wordless one, proffered by a chef who lightly clicked his teeth together, twice.

So, to sum up: thanks to David, Hazan, and other cognoscenti, we know that risotto must never be chalky, gluey, sticky, runny, dry, or swamped. We are aware of what it should precede. (Horses for courses.) We understand what sort of rice to use, and how to ride the wave. But let’s be honest. Next to the rivers of food that flood the modern appetite, risotto is a minor tributary. Specialist restaurants such as Risotteria, in Greenwich Village, and a suave London eatery named All’Onda have opened and closed, unmourned. “The Rice Book,” an encyclopedic global study by Sri Owen, devotes only nine of its three hundred and eighty-four pages to risotto. Who but a madman would become obsessed with the stuff?

Nobody is quite sure where risotto came from. There is a recipe for riso giallo in padella, or “yellow rice in a pan,” that dates from 1809 and features an enriching dash of bone marrow, but did that mark an innovation or codify a long-held custom? The raw materials, after all, had been around for ages. Rice has been planted in Italy since the fifteenth century, if not earlier, though whether it was imported by the Aragonese, the Moors, or the Saracens, or whether the Venetians brought it from Turkey, is a conundrum not easily settled. What we do have is a letter from 1475, in which the Duke of Milan undertakes to send a dozen sacks of rice to Niccolò de Roberti, an ambassador of the Duke of Ferrara, but of ladling stock he says nothing. To this bare fact may be added a pinch of myth, as recounted by the food writer Anna del Conte, who was born and raised in Milan:

In 1574, the daughter of the craftsman in charge of making the stained glass for the windows of the Duomo was getting married. One of the apprentices, who had a passion for adding saffron to the molten glass, hit on the idea of making the plain risotto for the wedding dinner turn gold like his windows. He gave some saffron to the host of the inn where the dinner was to take place and asked him to mix it into the risotto. The result was a most beautiful golden risotto.

Any leftovers, one imagines, were carried by a woodcutter’s daughter to her grandmother in the forest. I bet she wolfed it down. To this day, saffron is the defining mark of risotto alla milanese, and residents of the city will snort at the thought that a respectable version of the dish can be located anywhere else. Indeed, the further you dig into it, the more you realize that risotto, per se, does not exist—that there are only risotti, scores of them, native to their respective regions, and that you confuse them at your peril. Long ago, I had an earnest conversation with a maître d’, in Milan, who revealed that he and his cousin, having grown up in different valleys, held vehemently opposed views on what type of onion, white or brown, should go in a risotto. He also said that no risotto could improve on his grandmother’s, but that is par for the course. Everyone’s grandmother’s risotto is the best.Cartoon by Rich Sparks

Only since 1861 has Italy been a unified nation, and the history of food, like that of painting, has a curious way of dividing the country, anew, into its constituent parts—the city-states from which it was bound together. One of the joys of Pavia, for instance, a brief hop south of Milan, is risotto with frogs. For this you need frog stock, which sounds like a grunge band or a running gag on “The Muppet Show,” and if I have failed to cook it at home it’s not because of the recipe, which is thrilling to contemplate (“Create a chain by threading the frogs with undyed string”), but purely because of a lack of willing amphibians. No Italian gourmet, however, would dream of ordering frog risotto in Mantua, where risotto alla pilota, made with ground pork, leads the pack, let alone in Verona, where the throne is occupied by risotto all’Amarone.

Amarone, one of the beefiest of red wines, gives rise to the most potent of risottos; I was privileged, recently, to watch it in the making. One of the prime spots to do so is Bottega Vini, in central Verona. People have been tippling there for more than four hundred years, and the wine list has the heft—and the persuasive majesty—of a Gutenberg Bible. The kitchen, by contrast, is the size of a galley on a fishing smack. In order to observe the chefs at work without causing a pileup, I had to scrunch myself into a corner, stand very still, and pretend to be a stick of celery.

To judge by what I saw, this is how risotto all’Amarone is summoned into being: Butter, then rice, which toasts for a short while. No onions at all. Two and a half ladles’ worth of wine, which hisses like a serpent as it hits the pan. (The chef exclaimed, “Sempre con un fuoco vivace”—“Always with a lively fire.”) Lean in close enough, inhale, and you might, if your head is weak, begin to get vaporously drunk. As the alcohol boils off, add simmering water, followed by vegetable stock. Do not be startled by the simplicity of the thing. Scrape around the sides. Remove from the stove. A dab more butter, a strewing of Parmesan, and then, unexpectedly, another glug of Amarone, too late to be steamed away. It is there to throw a punch. The result is something to behold: glossy and purplish, darker and deeper than blood. Mark Rothko would have asked for seconds.

Go eastward and coastward and you will sail into risi e bisi. During the Venetian Republic, this used to be dished up to the doge on April 25th, St. Mark’s Day, to coincide with the first crop of peas: a typical marriage of homeliness and ceremonial grandeur. Another, more challenging forte of Venice is risotto al nero di seppia, which is made with the ink of cuttlefish. The cowardly cook will turn to squid as a replacement, but only cuttlefish deliver the essential alien squirm, and the relevant recipes are a treat. (“Pop the beak out of the head and slice it above and below the eyes. Save the tentacles and throats.”) What ensues is the black hole of Italian cuisine, sucking in both gravity and light. At my initial tasting—in 1984, again, with my parents as horrified spectators—I made the mistake of wearing a white shirt. Anyone seeing me in the aftermath must have thought that I’d been under attack from a calligrapher with a grudge.

Notice that all these recipes—the Veronese, the Venetian, the Mantuan, and so forth—are thoroughly grounded in the what and the where. Cuttlefish, by and large, don’t bum around in Milan. And don’t forget the when; one of the chefs in Verona carefully separated a portion of risotto all’Amarone and made a quick spinoff, folding in a purée of pumpkin and explaining that he was able and willing to do so only because it was autumn. To ring that sweet change in a pumpkinless season would be against the grain of nature. In “The Wonders of Italy” (1939), the Milanese writer and poet Carlo Emilio Gadda, a playful soul, was yet more exact in his advice: “When the first September rains fall, fresh mushrooms will end up in the pans; and after St Martin’s Day, dry truffle flakes cut with a special instrument in the shape of a clover leaf may be spread on the risotto.”

To insist upon these unities of time and place is not to imply that the act of eating risotto outside Italy is scarcely worth the gamble. It’s not like going to a bullfight in Denmark. If hunger beckons in the East Village, go ahead and book a table at Supper, where a daily risotto is on offer. (Wednesday is “Mushrooms and Pancetta with Crispy Egg.” Sunday is “Beets and Burrata.” Hmm.) I have long been amused by the extent to which risotto—more, perhaps, than any other dish—is greeted by chefs as a blank canvas on which to daub their edible art. It thus provides an object lesson in human error, however harmless, and in the undying delusion, found not only in kitchens but also in classrooms, bedrooms, and the corridors of government, that the way to make things better is to mess around with them.

You want strawberry risotto? Coming right up. How about cheesy risotto-filled poblanos with pickled onions, or black-rice risotto with dashi, scallops, and furikake butter (“When the foam subsides, add the furikake”), both described by Caryl Levine and Ken Lee in their book, “Rice Is Life”? The fact that All’Onda closed its doors, in London, in June, means that I will never get to sample its artichoke risotto with coffee, black lime, and sweetbread. A tragic loss. On the other hand, in a fancy hotel, I did meet a vegetarian risotto that still disturbs my sleep: a cow pie of brown rice crowned with a glade of greenery, menacing fungi, and a pungent mattress of Taleggio. It was the kind of thing you discover on the floor of a garden shed at the end of a long damp winter. Staring at it, aghast, I couldn’t help recalling the prudent wit of Ruth Rogers. She confided to me that what she most dreads hearing from any chef are the words “I have an idea.”

There is another way to make risotto. It is unrefined, frills-free, and a lot more fun than foaming. Also, you get to build up your triceps. The method has no official name. I call it risotto brutale.

To try your hand at this exciting sport, the place to go is not Italy at all. Chug north along Lake Maggiore and you will, at some imperceptible point, cross the border into Swiss waters. You are now in Ticino, a squat triangle that juts downward from the underbelly of Italian-speaking Switzerland. At the top of the lake lies Locarno, and there, as every summer dies, an annual risotto fever takes hold. This year, it lasted from August 19th to September 8th. At the Caccia al Risotto, or risotto hunt, multiple restaurants across the region unveiled creations of their own devising. Some of these I was glad to observe only in photographs, not least the risotto alla barbabietola, a wide, wet Frisbee of candy pink. Technically, the name refers to the cream of beetroot that is added halfway through, but the payoff looked like a high-camp homage to Barbie, far beyond my ken.

The climax of Locarno’s celebration is a risotto-making contest, which unfolds over two days in the Piazza Grande. This is an ancient rite, dating back to the mists of 2014, and rivalries have already grown amiably intense. On Friday, August 23rd, in a vast tent, a number of restaurant chefs, backed by sweltering assistants, wrought their magic. What they conjured up was doled out to the public, who stood patiently in line, like genial descendants of the boys in “Oliver Twist,” to be given a helping in a cardboard bowl. Having scarfed down my risotto al pesto di limoni e Merlot bianco con bocconcini di pollo croccanti e pepe Vallemaggia, which took longer to say than it did to eat, I could hardly suppress a plaintive cry: “Please, signor, I want some more.”

Nearby, at a table in the square, sat a bunch of thoughtful folks with paper, pens, and forks. This was the jury, whose task was to assess the evening’s inventions, and to decide whether the risotto with blue cheese, hazelnut butter, port, and lime, for example, did or did not trump the risotto alla faraona ubriaca, which means “risotto with drunken guinea fowl.” Watching the jury members as they sniffed each bowl in turn, like skeptical cats, I was told that they would be judging not only whether each risotto was well cooked, and how it tasted, but whether it possessed “equilibrium.” Appearance, reportedly, was not an issue—a smart move, given some of the risottos on parade.

The following day, it happened again, with a twist. This time, the competitors were not professional chefs but gruppi carnevale—guildlike associations from the area, essaying their risotto-crafting skills. I stopped at a workbench staffed by members of an amateur culinary club, based in Locarno, that goes by the name Ratatouille. “Like the movie!” they exclaimed. I gave them my name. “Like Anton Ego!” they said, referring to the lean, implacable critic who looms over the Pixar film. Thanks for the reminder. Then, somehow, I was press-ganged. Having asked what was cooking, I was ushered into the tent. Without warning, an apron was tied around my waist, a large implement was placed in my hands, orders were issued, and the stirring commenced. “I’ll only stay five minutes,” I said. Two and a half hours later, I was still there.

When you make risotto en masse, you say goodbye to fiddle and fuss. None of your regular pans and spoons. Instead, the risotto is cooked in cylinders the size of oil drums, heated by portable gas burners, and stirred with long wooden paddles that resemble oars. The latter could easily be repurposed for rowing on Lake Maggiore. On duty, at the appointed vat, I hooked up with Hermann Moosbrugger, who had taught for forty years in a village school in St. Gallen, in German-speaking Switzerland, before retiring to Locarno, and who radiated charm and calm. Not once did he complain as we clashed oars. Gradually, we got the hang of the two-man stir, which will stand me in good stead if I ever graduate to mixing cement.

Overseeing the action was Thomas Schnarwiler, who merrily poured the ingredients into our cauldron. Sack after sack of Carnaroli rice. Chopped leeks by the bagful. (These gave me a surge of fellow-feeling, for I often use them, risking a visit from the risotto cops, in lieu of onion.) Quart upon quart of wine, from a plastic bottle. Eye of newt and tongue of dog, presumably, when I wasn’t looking. And the brodo! To hell with the subtle translucence of chicken stock, or a muted vegetable broth. Here was a murky and unfathomable pond. Wallowing in its depths, like a walrus, was a joint of beef as big as a Wellington boot. At the close of the day, it was fished out, carved, and shared among the workers.

To be fair, it was well earned. What we produced, given how freely I perspired in toiling over the pot, was basically risotto al porre con sudore dello scrittore, or risotto with leeks and writer’s sweat, but it was surprisingly palatable, and nobody seemed to object. People lapped it up, and even the jury was taken in. We had achieved equilibrium. At the prize-giving, the Ratatouille team came second, and each of us, including the last-minute recruit, was handed another sack of rice. The reward for making risotto, in short, was the chance to make a fresh heap of risotto. The stirring never ends.

Is it wise to revisit the site of an epiphany, or hazardous? What signs of impact, if any, can be seen on the road back from Damascus? It’s difficult to say what is more vexing: the idea that we may be prostrated, all over again, by what felled us in the first place or the fear that we won’t. Thus it was, in September, that I found myself in Burano forty years on, pretty much to the day, from the earliest tremor of my risotto craze.

Come the end of the world, which, at the present rate, could be as soon as next week, I plan to hole up at the Trattoria da Romano. By repute, it is a welcoming haven. From the nineteen-thirties onward, clusters of artists were drawn there, paying bright and mischievous tribute to it in ink and paint. (In 2022, some of their works were exhibited at the Querini Stampalia Foundation, in Venice.) The pictures that hung on the walls of the restaurant in 1984 are still in place, and the menu is no less enduring in its roster of delights. The same risotto is on offer, thank heaven, though only now have I learned its name—risotto di gò. This does not mean you can buy it as takeout.

Gò is the Venetian dialect word for ghiozzo, which is an ugly, slimy, sardine-size, dung-colored fish that looks like Jean-Paul Sartre’s less attractive cousin. Under the surface, it’s mostly bone, so on no account should you attempt to eat it. You’d be better off chomping on a hedgehog. Nothing more unlovely inhabits the Venetian lagoon, and there’s the rub: the beast is notably loyal to that neighborhood. Given that a stock made from gò, strained through a sieve onto the rice, is what bestows the particular shade of flavor on the risotto, I have to conclude that the joke is on me. What I held to be a sacred mystery is nothing but geographic logic. The reason that I was never able to unearth my perfect risotto elsewhere, let alone to refashion it at my own stove, was that it can’t be made elsewhere. The holy grail will stay put forever, right where it always was, because the gò won’t go.

Backstage at the da Romano, the mantecatura was in session. The risotto, taken off the heat, received its buttery blessing. The chef gave it one last beating, with a kind of loving ferocity, and then, suddenly, lofted the contents upward, so that they flew into the air, to a height of almost two feet, before returning to the pan. Not a speck was spilled. This was done with a springy flick of the wrist; any passing squash player would have stopped to applaud the gesture. You could try it in your own kitchen, but I wouldn’t recommend it. The geyser of hot rice would either hit the ceiling or land on the cat. The purpose of the upfling, I guess, was aeration, though the artistry alone made it worthwhile.

It was not until later, after returning from Burano, that I wondered about the source of my pilgrimage. Why risotto, and why there? A truth struck home. My mother’s journey, in 1984, had not only been her first time in Venice; we also knew, though nobody said, that it would be her last. She was already sick, and she died eighteen months later. If we enjoyed a fine meal, in a melancholy city whose stones, like grains of rice, are forever softening into the liquid that surrounds them, what I ate was, in the end, of no consequence. Heavenly though it tasted, it was not the food of the gods. It was a small earthly pleasure, shared in a life-giving and unrepeatable moment that would grow, over the years, into a memento mori. It happened to be risotto. It could have been something else. ♦