Risotto

Appears in
The Café Paradiso Cookbook

By Denis Cotter

Published 1999

  • About
Two risotto memories invariably come to me when I take out a bag of arborio rice. The first is of a fellow Irish tourist in a hotel dining room on the last night of a package holiday in Sicily, a middle-aged well-off sort, travelled and fond of his food: ‘... and what’s more, the risotto was terrible, for God’s sake, it was wet as soup’. Maybe the risotto was poor, but the waiter’s eyes argued back that signor didn’t know what he was talking about, and I remember wishing I had eaten the risotto so I would know both sides of the misunderstanding. The other is a book I seem to have mislaid, by Burton Anderson, about the author’s visits to food artisans in Italy. He talked first to rice growers who spoke of good and bad vintage paddy fields, years and the merits and limitations of the many different risotto rices, not to mention the thousands of different varieties worldwide (most of which they, naturally, dismiss as not worth the trouble). Then he spoke to some of the best people cooking these rices in Italy. It’s a mindboggling chapter that could easily make you give up altogether until you had your own paddy held, but somehow I came out of it with a strong sense of how I liked and wanted to cook risotto - a bit like your man there, but that other fellow has a point too. They didn’t agree on much but you could tell they all made great risotto!