The legends about how risotto was invented are as numerous as the regional variations on this Italian stalwart, just as many of the apocryphal stories behind its birth are as questionable as those chefs' claims that they alone can teach you the one authentic method to cook this dish.
A Stodgy, Dodgy History of Risotto
One of the most frequently repeated legends about the "invention" of risotto, especially by the Milanese, is that risotto was invented in the 14th century in Milan by a young Flemish apprentice working on the city's famed Duomo. This history of risotto raises other questions.
According to the legend, the apprentice decided to add saffron, used as a pigment for decorating the cathedral, to add joyful colour to a rice dish that he cooked for a wedding feast. And lo, the famed Milanese risotto allo zafferano was born. The ferocity with which the Milanese claim the origins of risotto probably also accounts for the widespread misconception that risotto is a dish originally from the Northern Italy.
For hundreds of years, risotto has been a de facto Northern dish, but, in fact, it is almost certainly a dish introduced to the Italian peninsular, via Sicily, by the Moors, who occupied Sicily and other colonies such as Bari in the South in the 9th century. While there is evidence that Arab merchants were trading rice in Sicily and Southern Italy as early as the 6th century, these Muslim invaders three centuries later discovered that the terrain of Sicily and Southern Italy could produce forbearers of the varieties of short grain rice from which risotto is now generally made—Arborio, Baldo, Carnaroli, Maratelli, Padano, Roma or Vialone Nano.
"...the oldest recipe for what we now consider risotto is relatively recent, dating from 1809."
Incidentally, in the same period, the Arabs also began to cultivate hardy durum wheat in Sicily and introduced the antecedent of pasta, which puts paid to the Venetian myth of Marco Polo introducing noodles to Italy from China given that he wouldn't even be born until centuries later.
Compared with other dishes that we now think of as quintessentially Italian, the oldest recipe for what we now consider risotto is relatively recent, dating from 1809. But, it's not surprising that the creamy styles of risotto, rich with butter and cheese, originating in the North, have hogged all the limelight. It's hardly the only example in Italian history of the richer, more literate North ignoring both the contributions of Arab culture or the poorer South. Centuries after rice was first cultivated under more difficult conditions in Southern Italy, the majority of Italian rice production travelled north. So, it's easy to see how its earlier arrival on the Southern Italian table was easily elided.
However, the power classes of the North were just as likely to ignore the local poor as those down South. Despite the florid fable of the Flemish apprentice, the real reason that rice production moved to the North in the 14th century was due to a far grimmer reality. Following the decimation of the population during the Black Death of 1348, rulers needed to find a solution to food production problems; to find high-yield crops that could be cultivated by a reduced workforce. Rice offered the answer. And, the duke of Milan gave permission for vast swathes of Lombardy to be converted into paddy fields.
Within less than a century, Northern Italy, with its more hospitable climate and floodable plains became the powerhouse of rice production on the Italian peninsular. But, it was far from the elegant dish it purports to be today. It was a cheap food to nourish a population in need of rebuilding. While the aristocracy and rich merchant classes found ways to make it palatable to them—as a rich side dish brimming with butter and cheese to accompany venison or the vaunted ossobuco—it was mainly consumed by the poorer echelons of society as a main meal flavoured with a few vegetables, scraps of offal and a little lard or olive oil on a good day. Risotto (or the precursor thereof) was for poor people and remained that way for centuries.
"...fuelled on the passions of the Risorgimento, well-heeled Italians suddenly discovered their earthy ethnic roots..."
How risotto become one of the best known and most widely travelled of Italian dishes is even a little more dodgy. During the mid-19th century, when Garibaldi whipped the still fragmented peninsula into a frenzy of Nationalism in the groundswell that would lead to the expulsion of foreign rulers and the unification of Italy, risotto remained decidedly questionable in the eyes of the wealthy and professional classes with its connotations of peasant cooking and poverty.
But, fuelled on the passions of the Risorgimento, well-heeled Italians suddenly discovered their earthy ethnic roots and dishes such as Milan's signature saffron risotto became all the rage on affluent dinner tables, often with rich, supposedly "traditional" ingredients and accompaniments. Take for example Mantua's allegedly traditional rendition complete with sausage, pork and parmesan.
Just as Italy's confidence grew in its identity as a new, unified sovereign kingdom, so did the fashion for folkloric dishes and romanticised artisan cooking among the wealthy recede. The middle classes and decision makers returned to more sophisticated and richer fare. By the first decade of the 20th century more affluent Italians were looking beyond Italy, to French cuisine in particular, as a status symbol and signifier of good taste than at any other time in the country's history. Risotto returned to its original place at the table, marginalised below stairs as a dish for the servant, paesano or large working-class families struggling to make ends meet in rapidly growing industrial cities.
But here's the thing that no sentimental TV chef promising you the most authentic risotto recipe, nor copywriters for artisanal heritage brands—and certainly no one at the Ente Nazionale Risi, Italy's National Rice Authority—is ever going to tell you: what altered the fate of Italian rice and put risotto in the place that it still occupies today, firmly within the global canon of Italian classics, was fascism.
"...presenting rice as a healthy, patriotic food fit for the future master race..."
During the Belle Époque, risotto and other rice dishes were definitely persona non grata at stylish and respectable Italian tables, except for the occasional outing during some allegedly ancient folk festivals. Its associations with underclass cooking made it less and less visible on bourgeois tables.
However, during the economic turmoil that followed WWI, the middle classes increasingly felt the pinch as food prices soared. Furthermore, while this created the conditions that swept Mussolini and his National Fascist Party to power, things hardly showed any signs of abating as the global economic crisis of the early 1930s deepened. The exchange rate was not the only reason that food imports were becoming harder and harder to sustain. Mussolini's regime, deeply disliked by many foreign governments for its actions and policies, was subject to mounting sanctions that further threatened food supplies.
So, it's readily understandable that Mussolini and his cronies threw their weight behind rice. The fascist regime launched a massive nationwide propaganda campaign promoting Italian rice and used the Ente Nazionale Risi as the primary instrument for coordinating and delivering this strategy of stimulating patriotic consumption of Italian rice.
It was all wrapped in an ideology presenting rice as a healthy, patriotic food fit for the future master race that seems a set piece for ultra-right dictatorships. However, it had a pragmatic agenda. For one thing, rice was a relatively cheap, nutritious and filling foodstuff, able to fulfil Mussolini's populist promises of full bellies. But, far more importantly, it was grown abundantly in Italy. Since Il Duce had no intention of complying with the demands of the international community, he instead adopted a policy of working towards Italian food self-sufficiency as a means of bypassing the impact of sanctions.
Whether it was the charisma of Benito Mussolini in persuading middle-class housewives to patriotically look to rice or whether it was the begrudging realpolitik of relative food prices, Italian consumption of risotto across all regions ballooned during the fascist era, especially among the middle classes . And it's never really looked back. During the austere post-WII decade it was still a more affordable option for staving off hunger. And, by the time Italy hit the new affluence of the 1960s, it had become so engrained that is had, to some extent, become a staple dish, not only in the North.
In the 1960s and 1970s, its consumption in Italy dipped as millions of ordinary Italians discovered once unaffordable food luxuries becoming accessible to them. But, ever since the 1980s, its consumption has continued to grow for a number of reasons, both in Italy and beyond.
One reason for this was the global dissemination of the Mediterranean Diet. First discussed in the book Eat Well and Stay Well be Ancel and Magaret Keys published in 1959, by the 1980s the tenets of this dietary regime had become mainstream medical advice. Ancel Keys was an American doctor who first worked in Southern Italy during the Allied occupation following WWII. He so fell in love with the place that he moved to the Tyrrhenian Coast with his wife in the 1950s. Together they spent years researching a phenomenon that Keys had first noticed during his time as an army doctor; that despite a lifetime of living on what was then considered a "poor" diet, working-class Neapolitans had far better cardiovascular health than their richer compatriots who could afford an animal fat and meat-heavy diet in the North. The book and its sequel bestseller published in 1975 was backed up by decades of methodical and meticulous research undertaken by Ancel and wife Margaret.
The international medical community and millions of interested lay readers sat up and paid attention to How To Eat Well and Stay Well the Mediterranean Way upon its publication in 1975 and it has become the basis of much nutritional medicine taught today in the Western world and beyond. Even today, dieticians breathe easily when promoting it: Ancel Keys died a couple of months shy of his 101st birthday in 2004 as if living by his assertion that a diet high in grains, fish, fruit and vegetables and low in meat and saturated fats aids longevity.
Risotto, with its high content of fibrous rice and comparatively low fat and meat content, is a fine example of a dish fit for devotees of the Mediterranean Diet. But, in the ironic ultimate revenge of the South, it is obviously not the cheese-'n-butter or sausage-laden recipes from Northern Italy that work best for observing the diet, but the fish, seafood and vegetarian versions from Sicily, Southern Italy and the Adriatic Coast that use only olive oil and no cheese or butter.
In addition to Keys' books, which had many Italians clinging to them with national pride, another reason that risotto has been seriously on the comeback trail since the late 1980s is the overall impact of "Brand Italy" both at home and abroad.
"...this promotional strategy grew into the highly organised 'Brand Italy', a marketing machine of staggering proportions..."
Over decades, Italian cuisine has been repeatedly confirmed as one of the world's favourites and it's certainly clinched the place as Europe's favourite cuisine in official empirical research undertaken by the European Commission. Armed with data such as this, it's no wonder that a plethora of Italian governmental and industry bodies as well as individual largescale and artisan producers have persistently thrown resources at marketing Italian cuisine globally. It's paid off: Italian food is today a multi-billion dollar industry.
It was never really a gamble. Canny Italian food marketers knew that the 19th-century Italian Diaspora gave them a solid bedrock on which to build. Whether it was the impact of the dissemination of Italian cuisine through mass emigration to the United States or Brazil in the late-19th and early-20th centuries or the even older history of the Italian ristorante or deli that grew up in London, Munich or Cologne following the exodus of Italian republicans fleeing persecution after the failed revolutions of 1848, Italian food already had a footprint and fans in many parts of the world.
The concerted effort to promote Italian food and Italian cooking started in the post-WII era when a few wily entrepreneurs saw an opportunity in foreign markets to appeal to Allied troops who had fallen in love with Italian food before returning home. Eventually this promotional strategy grew into the highly organised "Brand Italy", a marketing machine of staggering proportions. Pastas and pizze were, and arguably still are, the lynchpins of this Italofication of global cuisine. But, by the 1980s, Brand Italy was looking to up its game.
One of the problems with pastas and pizze is that they all too easily don't need Italy. In Brazil, for example, the assimilation of pizza-culture into the mainstream meant that Brazilians had been making pizza with locally produced ingredients since the 1890s; likewise in the USA. Save for a very small export market servicing a diehard immigrant community that insisted on the real deal from back home, most Brazilians or Americans loved the recipes, but were equally happy making them with domestic ingredients.
So, when the Brand Italy machine decided to up its game and grow demand for "product of Italy", nurturing a consumer desire for authenticity in the 1980s, certain product categories were offered new opportunities. Marketers had already seen the potential through gains made within the European Common Market; most people would pay a little more for genuine Italian passata than for purée made from tomatoes grown in an industrial greenhouse on a Dutch polder. In fact, the groundswell for "genuine" products had grown so much globally by the late 1980s that even in countries charging import tariffs, consumers demanded real Italian food products.
This was a shot in the arm for risotto. For, unlike pastas or pizza ingredients that could be easily produced domestically in many countries, few were then producing or even able to produce the varieties of short grain rice for authentic risotto.
Monetising the chattering classes need to show off at their dinner parties with authentic dishes that they had "discovered" on their trips in an age of cheaper travel, Brand Italy sponsored road shows and invited international TV chefs, always dependent on a constant stream of novel recipe content, to come to Italy and learn more about risotto.
Producers brokered deals with large supermarket chains internationally, shifting risotto rice varieties from products once only found abroad on the shelves of small specialist delis in large urban centres to something easily picked up in suburban supermarkets. Pre-flavoured, easy-cook products previously the stuff of time-poor urbanites and students only available on the Italian market were suddenly available as fool-proof, exotic-yet-authentic meals for cautious homemakers in Bonn, Stockholm or Birmingham. Risotto entered the global canon of Italian cuisine with the added benefit for the Italian economy that it wasn't easily reproduced as a local knock-off.
"Stock and broth is their holy grail. And so, risotto is a natural dish of choice for their menus."
Perhaps inevitably, the international risotto boom also had a reflexive impact, seeing a resurgence not only in health-conscious Italian homes, but also on menus in the many tourist-facing eateries. Part of this was pure commercial savvy: give the foreign punters what they know they already like with the bragging right of supposed authenticity chucked in while cannily knowing that the profitable mark-up on a good risotto is undeniably better than on a bisteca.
But, specially from the mid-1990s onwards, it has also had to do with a shift in the psyche of a new generation of chefs who, almost in opposition to the fervour for "molecular gastronomy", had a near obsession with romanticised notions of authenticity, something that has become even more prevalent in the dominant discourse since then.
Eschewing fame and Michelin stars—while ironically gaining both in some cases—in favour of a supposedly traditional, somehow more honest cuisine made with local produce, ideally of long-forgotten heritage ingredients, these hipster chefs with their "neo-osteria" offerings have abounded in the last couple of decades in Italy much as they have elsewhere in the world. They are strongly aligned to the sustainable "slow food" movement that only cooks with organic, seasonal produce sourced locally. In their litany expensive delicacies give way to delicate flavours coaxed out of the most humble of ingredients on small menus that can change daily. Stock and broth is their holy grail. And so, risotto is a natural dish of choice for their menus.
Some years ago, when I was in Milan, I stumbled into one of these places in Navigli. It was autumn, work commitments had run over and I was starving. A sausage and fennel risotto on the menu board immediately caught my eye and I didn't hesitate in ordering it.
I was surprised when it arrived. It was unexpectedly light. There was no sign of butter or cheese, not that I felt like I was missing out. It oozed the most wonderful, delicate flavours. But no cheese or butter in the risotto? This was Milan after all.
It was a quiet evening early in the week, off-season with a chill in the air and therefore not very busy. As I was finishing every morsel of this risotto revelation, the chef came over to ask me if I had enjoyed it. My enthusiasm for his cooking pleased him and we got chatting, at first about the way he made the stock (with three different types of onions etc.) and the small farms they worked with in the local region.
Over another glass of excellent wine from near Lake Garda, the conversation turned to his philosophy of cooking. He was a very serious but gregarious young man in his twenties. He told me that part of what he wanted to do was preserve and raise local cooking traditions. The recipe for the risotto was given to him by his grandmother, who got it from her mother. His family had lived in Milan for as long as anyone could remember.
The way he said it carried this great respect, like he had the weighty responsibility for keeping an age-old dish alive. I'm sure it's possible that this particularly delicious risotto could have been passed down from generation to generation, tracing its origins all the way back the the 14th century when rice paddies first appeared in Lombardy.
But, doing the calculation in my head based on his apparent age, I couldn't help wonder about his great-grandmother. The lack of butter or cheese in a Milanese risotto. Was she really passing down some ancient heirloom of a recipe? Or, did she, in fact, concoct this recipe herself or read it in one of the many popular women's magazines of the 1930s where housewives shared their cost-saving recipes in support of Mussolini's patriotic rice drive at a time when butter and cheese were too expensive for most households to afford?
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