Palladian Days (27 page)
Authors: Sally Gable
Use a large, heavy pot (to distribute the heat evenly) and a wooden spoon (so that you don't break the grains of rice).
Use carnaroli rice rather than arborio. Carnaroli is harder to find in the United States, but it remains al dente longer,
especially if you plan to have leftovers. (I have used Uncle Ben's rice several times when desperate; the result is a tasty rice dish but not risotto.)Use your own homemade broth prepared from pieces of chicken and/or beef bones, plus an onion, a carrot, celery, perhaps a tomato. For a vegetable broth, omit the meat ingredients. (You can substitute a good prepared bouillon simmered several hours with an onion, a carrot, parsley, and herbs, but there will be some loss of quality.) Keep your broth simmering throughout the risotto preparation.
Grate your Parmesan just before you need it.
Never
use the grated cheese that comes in plastic containers from your supermarket deli. (No Italian market would even offer such a corruption.)At the conclusion of your risotto, when the rice is still firm and you've added the last scoop of broth, the final two tablespoons of butter, and the grated Parmesan, let the risotto “rest” for two minutes, covered in the pot, before transferring it to a serving dish; this enhances the flavor and the creaminess.
Silvana's squash risotto is my favorite
riso
dish in all the world, perhaps because it is as beautiful as it is delicious. A rich golden-orange
risotto della zucca
is made not with zucchini but with a winter squash—Hubbard or turban—or even with pumpkin itself. Silvana
always
prepares her own broth.
1 winter squash
1/4 cup finely minced yellow onion
1/2 teaspoon minced garlic
4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
6 to 8 cups rich vegetable broth, heated to simmering
2 cups carnaroli rice
Salt and pepper
3 tablespoons grappa or brandy 2 tablespoons butter
2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
2 tablespoons chopped parsley
Peel the squash and cut it up into
pezzettini
(small pieces). Saute the onion and garlic in the olive oil over low-medium heat until soft; add the squash cubes and V
4
cup of the vegetable broth. Simmer until the squash is soft, about 15 minutes.
Raise the heat to medium-high. Add the rice, stir well, and keep stirring until the mixture absorbs the liquid and begins to stick to the pan. Then begin adding 1/2 cup of broth at a time, stirring until the liquid is absorbed. Continue the cycle for 18 to 20 minutes, until the rice is tender but not mushy, creamy but not runny. Taste for texture; add salt and pepper if needed.
Remove from the heat. Stir in the grappa, butter, Parmesan, and chopped parsley. Let sit covered for two minutes before serving.
Una meraviglia!
Carl's favorite risotto is Wilma's
risotto agli asparagi
. Wilma says to use green asparagus, not white, when making soup or risotto, because green creates a more intense flavor.
6 to 8 cups rich vegetable or chicken broth, heated to simmering
1 pound green asparagus
4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 small yellow onion, minced
2 cups carnaroli rice
⅔ cup dry white wine
2 tablespoons butter
Salt and pepper
⅔ cup grated Parmesan cheese
Break off and discard the tough bottom ends from the asparagus, then wash the stalks well and cut them into one-inch pieces. (If the stalks are very thick or not very fresh, be sure to peel them and, in the next step, saute a few minutes longer.)
Heat the olive oil in a heavy pot and saute the onion over low heat. When the onion is soft, add the asparagus and continue sauteing for 6 to 8 minutes.
Turn the heat to medium-high. Add the rice and mix well. Add the white wine and let the rice absorb it. Add 1/2 cup of the simmering broth. Stir, letting the rice absorb all the liquid until the mixture begins to stick to the bottom of the pan. Then add more broth. Repeat this sequence of adding broth and stirring continuously until the rice is the proper texture. Approximately 18 minutes after you add the rice, the risotto will be almost done. Test to be sure the rice is al dente but not too firm. Stir in a final 1/2 cup of broth if needed.
Remove from the heat, stir in the butter, the salt and pepper if needed, and the Parmesan. Cover the pan and let rest for 2 minutes.
Buon appetito!
Wilma also makes a memorable asparagus soup. Begin by sauteing raw potato cubes with the onion and asparagus, she says. When they are tender, puree the mixture, add 4 cups of rich chicken broth, simmer a few minutes, and finish by adding a little milk and butter.
Che buono!
Marina Bighin one night served us a
primo piatto
of scrumptious risotto created from the most unlikely pairing of vegetables: eggplant and zucchini. I like eggplant in any form whatsoever—
broiled, fried, souffleed, stuffed—but this was my first eggplant risotto. It's so delicious, I'll have to call it:
1/2 cup finely chopped yellow onion
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
l eggplant, peeled and cubed
1 zucchini, cubed
5 to 7 cups vegetable broth, heated to simmering
2 cups carnaroli rice
3 tablespoons good grappa or brandy
2 tablespoons butter
⅔cup grated Parmesan cheese
Saute the onion in the olive oil over low heat until it is soft. Add the cubed eggplant and zucchini to the saute, along with 4 cup of the broth.
After five minutes, raise the heat to medium-high and add the rice. Stir until the rice has absorbed the liquid. Add the grappa. Stir until all the liquid is absorbed. Then add another 1/2 cup of the broth, stirring well until the mixture almost sticks to the pan. Repeat this process of adding broth and stirring for about 18 minutes, then taste for texture.
When the rice is almost ready, al dente and not too soft, remove it from the heat and add one final 1/2 cup of broth, the butter, and the Parmesan. Stir well and cover. Let the risotto rest for 2 minutes, then serve.
O mamma mial
My first risottos were prepared only with butter, no oil, because of a risotto book I found at a remainder sale.
Silvana saw me making a butter-only risotto one day and objected,
“O, Sally, burro e troppo pesante!
Butter is too heavy.” So now, with most risottos, I use good olive oil for the sauteing part, adding butter only at the end.
Several friends, Irene among them, insist on beginning a risotto with half butter, half oil. Beginners might start with this compromise mixture; later they can decide what they prefer in their own risotto.
I've included some more favorite recipes from my Piombino Dese friends in an appendix at page 253.
Authority
The train station in Piombino Dese is one long block from the villa. Trains leave hourly for the forty-minute ride into Venice. Once, twice, or even three times a week Carl and I become famished for the myriad flavors of the lagoon city, so we catch the 8:30 a.m. train for a morning in town. We return to Piombino Dese about 2:00 p.m. for a late lunch and a brief
riposo
.
Many of our fellow passengers on the early train are students at the University of Venice. Like most Italian universities, the University of Venice is a commuter school, drawing students from their homes throughout the eastern Veneto. Many students are already aboard when the train pulls into Piombino Dese; others board at each of the six stops into the city. They are easily recognizable by their youth, their books and large portfolios, their chatter and easy camaraderie. Some mornings we spot the children of friends in the crowd, and they break away to come and converse with us as we wait on the train platform.
One such young friend tells us that her professor, learning that she is from Piombino Dese, has expressed an interest in visiting Villa Cornaro. We encourage her to bring her professor for tea. She arrives at 4:00 p.m. on the date agreed, in the company of both her professor and his wife. The professor is a charming, ebullient gentleman. I have anticipated his visit with great interest because he is
a noted authority on Roman and Renaissance art and architecture. Perhaps I can pry from him some insights into our beloved villa.
In a most engaging manner, the professor lectures to us nonstop for three hours as we walk through the villa and then sit for tea on the south portico. His discourse combines the interesting, the possible, and the improbable, all delivered with equal certainty and enthusiasm. Among the books he has written is one on the evolution of Italian gardens through the past four hundred years. He urges us to remove our small pots of begonias lining the south entrance steps and to install large pots of lemon trees in rows through the park leading to the bridge.
“Begonias,” he says disparagingly, “entered Italy only in 1927. They have no place at this ancient monument.” Lemon trees, he assures us, will survive Venetan winters if we move them in the fall to a sheltered spot on the southwest corner of the villa and cover them with heavy plastic. Carl and I have discussed installing lemon trees in the past, but worry that Ilario would have trouble wrestling five-hundred-pound pots to their winter shelter.
The bridge at the far side of the park, the professor informs us, originally had a “parapet,” or low wall, along both sides; he delivers this pronouncement as we drink tea on the south portico. He has not walked out to the bridge to examine its edges, nor does he suggest any possibility that his statement is a hypothesis. In physically examining the bridge later, Carl and I can find no trace of lost parapets.
Our visitor assures us that the spaces between the side columns on the south portico are 11/2 times the diameter of the column bases. This, he says, is based on his study of Roman houses. I refrain from mentioning that I have measured these spaces; they are precisely 21/4 times the diameter of the column bases, just as Palladio recommends in the first of his
Four Books:
The ancients … approved of those intercolumniations that were of two diameters and a quarter, and they reckoned this a beautiful and elegant manner of intercolumniations
.
No one knew who painted the frescos of our villa until 1950, when Nicola Ivanoff, a Russian scholar, discovered the original signed contract between the artist and his patron, Andrea Cornaro. The contract from 1716 lay among those thousands of cartons of documents in the archives of the Museo Correr in Venice that I still puzzle over. Young Mattia Bortoloni, the contract revealed, was paid four hundred ducats for painting 104 frescos and several doors throughout the villa.
Twenty-five years after Ivanoff's discovery, Douglas Lewis returned to the same trove to uncover a whole range of further findings that had eluded Italian scholars through centuries of commentary on Palladio and the villa. Doug demonstrated that Villa Cornaro was not a construction of the 1560s as previously maintained, but rather a design of 1551—and therefore perhaps Palla-dio's earliest major villa for a Venetian patron. The redating significantly affects the view of Palladio's artistic development.
Doug also disproved another factoid of architectural history. For centuries scholars had chortled that the pioneering art historian Giorgio Vasari was mistaken in 1568 when he wrote, in
Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects
, that “Sanmicheli also built the Casa Cornara at Piombino.” Poor Vasari, they said with some glee, is confused about Palladio's villa in Piombino; he thinks it was designed by Sanmicheli. Doug found documents proving that for more than two hundred years the Sanmicheli and Palladio villas stood side by side. In fact, he located a 1707 rendering of the two villas. The Sanmicheli villa was razed in 1795.
I have learned firsthand just how arduous and tedious Doug's work was, the painstaking perusal of records written in Latin, Venetan, and Italian—all in a handwriting baffling to a modern American eye.
A famous, elderly Italian authority on Palladio visits the villa one day early in our ownership, leading a study group of about a hundred young men and women. His books and articles on Palladio are known throughout the world. Carl accompanies the group as the scholar explains, arms waving enthusiastically, head bobbing
energetically, that the original villa owners would have ridden their horses up the broad, gently rising southern steps of the villa and dismounted directly onto the portico. That is simply not true, as he would have known if he had examined the stairs—or even talked with a horseman. It's clear from inspection that the present steps were reconfigured sometime in the past, so they are no longer in their original profile. Initially, as illustrated in
Four Books
, the stairs rose very abruptly from ground level; as reconfigured and lengthened in the early 1700s, the grade is reduced by half. Even with the reduced grade, a horse would have great difficulty maneuvering the extremely irregular surface of rough stones without injury; no sensible rider would have exposed his mount to such danger.
The latest publication of a prestigious architectural study group—a large, expensive tome written by authorities in the field—states in its discussion of our villa that the upper floor is divided into two suites, each approached by separate stairs. How did such a misconception arise? The floor plan upstairs is identical to the floor plan of the first floor, a single unified space. The authorities seem to have assumed that because La Malcontenta and several others have separate apartments upstairs, Villa Cornaro must also.
Numerous students from the universities of Venice, Padua, Udine, and once even Rome request our permission to study particular aspects of the villa for their theses: the interior brick stairs, the floor patterns, the capitals of the columns, the statues. We happily give permission, asking only that they furnish us a copy of the finished work, or at least the part relating to Villa Cornaro. We are almost uniformly disappointed in the ultimate theses because of the absence of primary research. Citation is usually centered on secondary sources of highly uneven quality, buttressed by a few desultory measurements and photographs. Meanwhile, thousands of cartons of documents rest unexamined in the archives of the Museo Correr and other archives of Venice, their difficult and challenging contents awaiting another Ivanoff or Lewis, someone with the imagination and diligence to challenge the authorities.
