RISOTTO À LA MILANAISE.
Slice a large onion very thin, and divide it into shreds; then fry it slowly until it is equally but not too deeply browned; take it out and strain the butter, and fry in it about three ounces of rice for every person who is to partake of it. As the grain easily burns, it should be put into the butter when it begins to simmer, and be very gently coloured to a bright yellow tint over a slow fire. Add it to some good boiling broth lightly tinged with saffron, and stew it softly in a copper pan for fifteen or twenty minutes. Stir to it two or three ounces of butter mixed with a small portion of flour, a moderate seasoning of pepper or cayenne, and as much grated Parmesan cheese as will flavour it thoroughly. Boil the whole gently for ten minutes, and serve it very hot, at the commencement of dinner as a potage.
Obs.—The reader should bear in mind what we have so often repeated in this volume, that rice should always be perfectly cooked, and that it will not become tender with less than three times its bulk of liquid.
STUFATO.
(A Neapolitan Receipt.)
“Take about six pounds of the silver side of the round, and make several deep incisions in the inside, nearly through to the skin; stuff these with all kinds of savoury herbs, a good slice of lean ham, and half a small clove of garlic, all finely minced, and well mingled together; then bind and tie the meat closely round, so that the stuffing may not escape. Put four pounds of butter into a stewpan sufficiently large to contain something more than that quantity, and the beef in addition; so soon as it boils lay in the meat, let it just simmer for five or six hours, and turn it every half hour at least, that it may be equally done. Boil for twenty-five minutes three pounds of pipe maccaroni, drain it perfectly dry, and mix it with the gravy of the beef, without the butter, half a pint of very pure salad oil, and a pot of paste tomatas; mix these to amalgamation, without breaking the maccaroni; before serving up, sprinkle Parmesan cheese thickly on the maccaroni.”
We insert this receipt exactly as it was given to us by a friend, at whose table the dish was served with great success to some Italian diplomatists. From our own slight experience of it, we should suppose that the excellence of the beef is quite a secondary consideration, as all its juices are drawn out by the mode of cooking, and appropriated to the maccaroni, of which we must observe that three pounds would make too gigantic a dish to enter well, on ordinary occasions, into an English service.
We have somewhere seen directions for making the stufato with the upper part of the sirloin, thickly larded with large, well-seasoned lardoons of bacon, and then stewed in equal parts of rich gravy, and of red or of white wine.
BROILED EELS WITH SAGE. (ENTRÉE.)
(German Receipt.) Good.