Boletus Risotto

Persians and Mesopotamians already knew the secrets of this food around the 5th century BC, and from there it reached Syria and Egypt. Theophrastus, spiritual son of Aristotle, already mentions “oruzon” as an exotic food. Dioscorides referred to the benefits of its cooking water and it is possible that Horace, Pliny, and Columella tasted the flavor of its grains firsthand in some extinct dish. Rice arrived through the same trade routes and sea currents as spices from the remote lands of the Ganges, Mekong, Yangtze, Bengal, Philippines, Java deltas… There is a precious illustrated Chinese agronomy treatise from the Ming era that details how this precious seed was cultivated there. But it was the Arabs in the 8th century who gave us the science of its cultivation in the soft wetlands of Valencia and the Delta. In the books of Ibn Razin and Abu Zacaria Ibn el Awan, there are already primitive rice dishes that curiosity and hunger later enriched with game meat, herbs, vermin, fish and sea creatures, or seeds.

Italians added butter, porcini mushrooms, and Parmesan cheese. They say it was the Sforza family who started its cultivation in the unhealthy marshes of the Po river, full of malaria and cholera. Centuries later, they explained to us the arduous work of its cultivation in the mud in the neorealist movie “Bitter Rice”. There, Silvana Mangano, at nineteen years old, shows us her plump legs in a proletarian and hungry postwar eroticism. Here in Spain, risottos are things of modernity and millenarianism, seventies tourism to see the leaning tower, eighties trips to Rome, Erasmus in Naples, and those first Italian restaurants in these paella-loving lands that surpassed the obsession with four-season pizza and the cursed spaghetti carbonara.

This rice dish is easy to cook. The quality of the mushrooms and butter is essential. Fresh porcini mushrooms (or dried and rehydrated) perfume the rice, and Parmesan cheese fills the rice with salty nuances. There is no trick or deception in the dish, just follow the steps of the video, especially the first ones, walking after the mushrooms, breathing the clean air of the mountain without ambition or greed.

Ramón J. Soria Breña