Italian risotto dish makes room for beans, red wine
Paniscia. The word sat at the top of the menu’s short list of first courses.
It is a specialty risotto of the area, explained the waiter at Ristorante Monteariolo, in the northern Italian town of Novara, about 90 minutes east of Turin. Beans and sausage and vegetables.
Beans in risotto? Never heard of such a thing. I had to have it.
Jet-lagged, seriously sleep-deprived, I found in the large soup plate of paniscia soul-filling comfort and a rustic, warm welcome to Italy. The serving was gut-busting. I ate every grain. Then I had tartare of beef, a specialty of Piedmont, the region where Novara is located, with grilled radicchio leaves all around.
Novara (the city and province of the same name) is in the Po Valley, known for, among other products, the rice (including arborio, carnaroli and vialone nano) that gives risotto its distinctive, creamy texture. Though many risotto dishes are eaten throughout this wide-reaching agricultural region, which spreads from western Piedmont across the top of Italy to the Adriatic, it turns out that some are so local that they reflect the cuisine of just the province or town: Mantua’s pilota, named after the rice mill workers who, needing a substantial dish, bolstered their rice with ground pork and cheese. Or in Padua, risotto with butter, cream, cheese and chicken livers.
The paniscia of Novara reflects its region boldly. As Marcella Hazan writes in “More Classic Italian Cooking,” it amounts to risotto cooked with red wine of the region (Piedmont is the land of barolo, barbera and dolcetto), to which a robust minestrone is added. The sausages used to enrich the dish are local as well. As are the beans.
Back in the States, I tracked down the recipe for the dish I ate that night through Facebook. Matteo Lorenzini, who manages Monteariolo, his family’s restaurant, was happy to share the recipe, and, without prompting, suggested substitutions for ingredients (namely the sausages).
Making it and eating it again was like revisiting Novara through its cuisine. A beautiful way to travel.
About the recipe
Monteariolo’s version of paniscia is rich with four pork products, two local sausages (salam d’la duja, a somewhat soft, half-cured sausage finished submerged in pig fat, like a confit, and fidighina, made with liver), lardo (cured pig fat) and cotenna (pig skin, uncooked or sometimes cured). Because the sausages cannot be imported to the U.S., we skipped the fidighina. For the salami, I used a mildly flavored artisan Tuscan variety.
My butcher was happy to cut a piece of pig skin off a roast pork, and charge very little for it (a half-pound for $1.60). Lardo can be found in some Italian specialty shops or butchers, but you can substitute lard or even some olive oil. The second time I tested the dish, I skipped the lard and found the risotto still rich and flavorful. The idea is to have enough fat in the pan to coat the grains of rice during toasting.