I Did Not Eat Risotto As A Child

 

      I did not eat risotto growing up. Why is that?  My mother was a lousy cook. She could burn water. My grandparents lived next door to us in the metropolitan area on the east coast. They both cooked. My grandmother who cooked every day delivered hr delicious meals to our house. Thank God for that. My mother's idea of haute cuisine was the cheapest cut of chuck steak swimming in unseasoned canned tomato sauce. My grandparents "kind of" collaborated on the Sunday meal. My grandfather cooked a part of the Sunday meal starting on Saturday afternoon in his own well stocked kitchen in the basement while my grandmother, whose kitchen was upstairs, where most kitchens are cooked the other parts of the Sunday meal.They complemented each other quite well.
      Be patient I am relating this for a reason. An old Italian expression says that "the shortest distance between two points is an arabesque". My grandfather, from the south of Italy married a northern italian woman who often made polenta and pasta by hand and cooked lots of seafood. He almost always made the tomato sauce and prepared meat and vegetables. My grandmother's family came from a place at the foot of the alps called Biella and my grandfather came from a small town near Naples called Avelino. This may have had something to do with my not eating risotto as a child. After reading a little about risotto I discovered that rice entered Italy through the middle east along with the Arab invasion of Spain. The Arabs copped rice from the Greeks. The Greeks discovered rice from Alexander the Great's excursions into India. The Indians got it from the Chinese. The Greeks didn't give a rat's ass for rice but the Arabs saw something of value,,,,, a little like the story of the potato and tomato in Italy. (that is another interesting food journey). Rice entered Italy through Venice and then Lombardy in the north. Since my grandmother's family came from Biella in Piedmont, the next province west of Lombardy, perhaps rice was not a part of their diet. Dishes in Italy, at least many years ago, were very regional. Spaghetti is still more of a southern dish than a northern one. My grandmother often made Polenta. I was just reading that in Biella corn was first planted in the 17th century and polenta became a staple of their diet. There is a substantial wool industry in Biella to this day and interestingly when I was growing up we ate alot of lamb. I believe that my grandfather's southern style married with my grandmother's northern palette produced a food fusion of Napolitano-Biellese,,,, and a family that liked polenta, lamb, seafood (bay of Naples), things with tomatoes (The earliest discovered cookbook with tomato recipes was published in Naples in 1692 although the author stole from Spanish sources,, who stole from the Aztecs and Maya),, and we loved pasta.I was seriously lucky.