Brought by the Arabs first to Spain and then to Sicily between the 700th and 800th centuries, rice in medieval Arab and Jewish cuisine was already paired with saffron for color, but boiled and seasoned with chicken fillets or young mutton, flavored with cinnamon. This was also a common practice at medieval Western banquets, where color was a key prerogative. The combination of rice and saffron has therefore existed for a long time, albeit in different forms.
Rice remained a prized commodity for a long time, and until the 14th century it was considered an imported spice, used in soups, cooked in milk, or overcooked as a binder for desserts, or in medicinal preparations. It seems that the first seedlings were cultivated by the Aragonese in the Orto dei Semplici of the Scuola Salernitana around 1440. From there, due to political and kinship ties between the Aragonese and the Visconti, and later the Sforza, it moved north to the Po Valley and the Vercelli area, thanks to the marshy soil, spreading throughout Europe in the 16th century.
Risotto is also an integral part of our region's gastronomic culture. It was only at the end of the 19th century that yellow risotto with luganiga sausage began to be eaten, becoming a typical Christmas lunch. It then became a staple of major holidays around 1900, and later a Sunday dish, and today it is a weekday staple. Even today, risotto is served to the entire population at major village festivals, including Carnival.
Until 1700 rice knows only one cooking technique: the boilingRice, boiled and then flavored during a second cooking, was a very popular dish in medieval and Renaissance cuisine throughout Europe. It was often made from starch, rice reduced to flour, first boiled, then mixed with animal milk or almond milk on fasting days, seasoned with ginger and sugar when preparing the recipe for Blancmange, which was turned yellow with egg yolks and saffron. Thinly sliced chicken or fish was sometimes added during Lent. These dishes are also included in the recipe book from the second half of the 1400th century by Maestro Martino from Blenio.
In the first decades of the 16th century, at the Este court in Ferrara, they ate Turkish style, cooked in milk and seasoned with butter and rose water and Sicilian style, cooked in fatty broth and shaped into a ball with an egg inside, with cheese and saffron and sautéed in a casserole. And Bartolomeo Scappi, in his recipe book Opera from 1570, mentions for the first time a Lombard-style rice dish, boiled in broth, colored yellow by the addition of cervellata, alternating layers with fresh provatura (mozzarella-type cheese), and baked in the oven. In the Netherlands, too, it was a festive dish, especially for wedding celebrations, combining the propitiatory function of the grains (a wish for wealth and fertility) with the solar image of saffron, yellow as gold, a sign of bright good fortune.
In the 17th century, many cooks continued to consider it a sweet ingredient in recipes for rice soup, cooked in milk or broth depending on the lean or fat period, with eggs, sugar, and cinnamon, as pasta was seasoned at the time.
The term risotto was still unknown up to this point, and the current technique of slowly cooking it with broth was completely unknown. Everything changed with toasting, but it wasn't until the late 1700s that risotto giallo began to take shape.
The first innovation is witnessed by a recipe book of the 1779, The Chef from Macerata by Antonio Nebbia where the cereal, with a revolutionary method, is produced for the first time fried in a little butter e soaked in broth, left to soak for two hours in cold water. In the 1785 Oniatologia (Food Science), we read about a Milanese-style rice soup, where the rice is boiled in salted water, with a good knob of butter added when it boils, and seasoned with cinnamon, Parmesan cheese, and six egg yolks.
In 1791, risotto in Piedmont was already a traditional dish, even if only for the high society: the Savoys used to serve it at midnight, during receptions. In the book The art of making tasteful cuisine, published in Turin in 1793 the technique becomes even more modern with the addition of a pinch of onion, chopped, before being moistened with a glass of milk and flavoured with spices.
But here is finally the first risotto recipe in the modern sense of the term. The modern chef by the anonymous LOG, Milan 1809, yellow rice in a pan: sautéed in a sauce of butter, brains, marrow, onion, progressively moistened with hot broth in which saffron had been dissolved. The final step towards the birth of this recipe was taken by Felice Luraschi, a Milanese chef who wrote in his Il nuovo cuoco milanese (Milan, 1829): "Cut an onion with a mezzaluna, add some beef fat and marrow, a little butter, toast everything and pass it through a sieve, add the necessary amount of rice, a little saffron, a little nutmeg and cook it in good broth, stirring it from time to time. Halfway through cooking, add half a brain, let it cook, add some grated cheese and serve."
The cervellato, already mentioned by Scappi, appears, a sort of sausage made from pork meat and brains, fat (often from kidneys), beef marrow, spices including saffron, prepared and sold by butchers in various versions, but almost only in Lombardy.
Over the years, the cervellato disappeared, replaced with the beef marrow that was part of it or with the gras de rost, that is, the cooking juices of the roast, a condiment present in all bourgeois families of the early twentieth century.
The presence of wine has also always been a subject of debate. Deglazing rice with white or red wine appears to be a custom born precisely from the disappearance of the roast sauce in the risotto, which already contained the wine and therefore the acidic component. In the early 900s, Pellegrino Artusi He offers two versions, the first without wine, the second with white wine to add a touch of acidity and cut the fat from the risotto. The first recipe doesn't mention beef marrow or any other fat; the second, which he describes as "heavier on the stomach but tastier," does include marrow and white wine. In a third recipe, he ventures further with Marsala.
Until then, the rice used to make risotto belonged to a variety of heterogeneous varieties, all known as Nostrale rice. Only 100 years ago, at the Rice Growing and Irrigated Crops Experimental Station in Vercelli, Professor Giovanni Sampietro experimented with and introduced, for the first time in Italy and Europe, the technique of crossbreeding different rice varieties. And 80 years ago, through this very hybridization technique, the world's most beloved and well-known Italian rice variety, Carnaroli, was born on a farm in Paullo, thanks to Ettore De Vecchi, a rice grower searching for the grain. He crossed Vialone Nano, created in 1937, with Lencino, ensuring the former's exceptional cooking resistance and the latter's remarkable ability to absorb flavors. Since the 70s, when broadcast sowing, that is, throwing seeds into the fields, replaced transplanting, this grain found the right conditions to grow, thus beginning to spread the perfect rice for risotto.
