Risotto alla Milanese I

History

Milan's golden risotto is bound to a famous legend: in 1574, the story goes, a Flemish glassmaker's assistant nicknamed Zafferano — teased for the saffron he ground into a Duomo stained-glass window then depicting the life of Saint Helena — stirred the spice into the rice at his master Valerio di Fiandra's daughter's wedding. The tale is told as folklore, not record; no recipe survives from that era, and the record stays silent between the legend and the 1800s. Rice itself had reached the Po plain earlier, spreading north from Sicily and Naples through ties between the Aragonese and the Sforza, the wet Lombard lowlands suiting its cultivation. The dish enters the written record only in the early nineteenth century, when Milanese cookbooks — among them Giovanni Felice Luraschi's Nuovo cuoco milanese economico (1829) — set down a "riso giallo in padella" of butter, onion, saffron-steeped broth and beef bone marrow. Artusi's three 1891 variants sit squarely in that tradition: all saffron-yellow, ranging from a plain butter-and-onion version to richer ones with marrow, white wine or Marsala — offered, he adds, without presuming to instruct Milan's own cooks.

Ingredients

• g rice
• g butter
• saffron
• onion
• broth
• parmesan

Instructions

1. Cook as in No. 75: sweat half a chopped onion in part of the butter, add the rice, and cook with broth added a ladle at a time.
2. Pound the saffron fine and dissolve it in a drop of hot broth, then stir it into the rice to colour it well yellow.
3. Finish with the rest of the butter and serve with parmesan. Serves five.