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 stained-glass window at the Duomo — stirred the spice into the rice at his master's daughter's wedding. It is told as folklore, not as record. No recipe survives from that era, and the written trail stays silent between the legend and the 1800s.

The dish enters the written record only in the early nineteenth century, in Milanese cookbooks that set down a yellow rice cooked in a pan with butter, onion, saffron-steeped broth and beef bone marrow.

Artusi's three 1891 variants sit squarely in that tradition, and all three are saffron-yellow. The first is plain: rice, butter, half a middling onion, and saffron enough to make it good and yellow, which he tells the cook to buy whole and pound in a bronze mortar. The second he calls more complicated and heavier on the stomach, but tastier — it adds beef marrow and white wine. The third he offers with a courtesy worth keeping: he presents it, he says, without any pretension of taking the lead from the cooks of Milan, whom he calls learned and ingenious in this matter.

The rest of the dish's early history — the route by which rice reached the Po plain, and the named 1829 cookbook usually credited with the first printed yellow risotto — we learned from popular reference and food-writing sources, and we were unable to locate the evidence they rest on.

Ingredients

• 500 g rice
• 80 g butter
• saffron
• 1/2 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.