Chance and Science
As a medical student, I greatly enjoyed Rivka Galchen’s piece about Hugh Herr and Matthew Carty’s work developing a new kind of prosthetic limb (“Leg Work,” December 16th). When I read about how Herr’s getting lost on Mt. Washington in the cold and having the lower halves of his legs amputated as a result led him to want to “devote his life to something worthwhile,” I couldn’t help but think of the role that chance plays in medical innovation. This brought to mind a discovery made by Ambroise Paré.
Paré, who lived from 1510 to 1590, worked on the battlefields of France, and was taught to cauterize gunshot wounds with boiling oil. When, one day, Paré ran out of oil, he concocted an ointment from the materials he had on hand. To his surprise, the soldiers who received this makeshift treatment fared better than those who received cauterization. Like Paré, who revolutionized wound care, Herr and Carty seem to be transforming medicine in part as a result of chance circumstance.
Paul S. Sherban
Boston, Mass.
Risotto Memoirs
I am a native Venetian, and Anthony Lane’s essay about risotto set off a stream of memories for me (“Stirring Stuff,” December 23rd). I thought of what it was like when I first moved away, to Iowa, and it was pretty much impossible to find Italian ingredients—good rice, good Parmigiano, and the like—and how, during that time, I applied skills learned from my family and fixed what were at best approximations of this great dish.
Lane’s discussion of risotto di gò brought back scenes from my youth. Growing up, my friends and I used to fish for gò—mostly for fun, because our moms did not necessarily look forward to the process of preparing it for cooking. Nobody exports those ugly, slimy fish, so it’s an ingredient really tied to Venice and its lagoon (where my friends and I found plenty of gò). I want to thank Lane for stirring up these memories. I guess risotto can be the madeleine of Proust, if you are Venetian.
Giulio Ongaro
Orange, Calif.
Lane writes that “Nobody is quite sure where risotto came from.” Although that is not inaccurate, there are some records of risotto-like dishes from the early modern period. The earliest printed recipes for such a dish, as far as I am aware, are found in the Ferrarese courtier Cristoforo di Messisbugo’s “Banchetti, Composizioni di Vivande e Apparecchio Generale” (“Banquets, Recipes, and General Utensils”), which was published in Venice in 1549. Its recipe for “rice or farro in the Turkish style” instructs the reader to mix rice, milk, an aged cheese, and sugar, constantly stirring over a low heat for about half an hour, and then to add butter, a splash of rosewater, and sugar, to serve. The next recipe is for “rice or farro with egg yolks and cheese,” in which the rice is cooked in broth with saffron and cheese, stirred well, and then garnished with cinnamon (optional) and sugar.
To our modern palate, the addition of sugar and milk might disqualify these recipes as risotto’s predecessors. However, in the fifteen-hundreds, the rigid binary of sweet and savory did not exist as it does (more or less) in Italian cuisine now. More important, it is clear that both dishes are executed following the method for preparing risotto. As for the first recipe’s reference to “the Turkish style,” some speculate that the dish has its origins in the lands that are modern-day Turkey.
None of this provides a definitive answer, of course, but it suggests the complex history of a dish that has been served in some form on the Italian peninsula since at least the sixteenth century.
Ariella Minden
Rome, Italy
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