As a child, risotto was my favorite dish that my mom, strictly following her father’s recipe, would make. Today, risotto has become an innately Italian dish. In most Italian restaurants, you will find at least one type of risotto on the menu. Strangely, despite it’s inherent Italian-ness, rice and risotto are relatively new introductions to Italian cuisine. Rice has a long history of domestication in Asia and was not brought to Italy for several thousand years after being domesticated (P. Huang et al. 2012, X. Huang et al. 2012). Despite its foreign origins, I argue that the way rice and risotto have developed in Italy has given them unique traits that make them traditional Italian foods. In this paper, I will go over the origins and domestication of rice, and its introduction to Italy, outlining various theories on the subject. This will be concluded by an argument on why risotto is, in fact, an Italian dish.
It is widely accepted that Oryza sativa (domesticated rice), and its various cultivars, are the direct descendants of Oryza rufipogon, a wild species of rice still grown …show more content…
So how did rice end up being the main ingredient in a traditional Italian recipe? Well, the majority of rice grown in Italy are sub-species of the japonica cultivar, which would indicate that Italian rice’s origins were Chinese (Sommella et al. 2013:39). This is backed up by genetic studies that have also traced Italian rice to Northern China (Cai et al. 2013). However, the exact route that rice took from China to Italy is still unclear. Since Italy was only unified during the 19th century, rice may have been introduced to different regions at different times (Ferrero and Vidotto 2010:345). Although rice began to appear in the Italian archaeological record by the first century (Muthukumaran 2014:3), it appears that rice only became a staple crop, rather than a foreign import, centuries later (Ferrero and Vidotto
It is widely accepted that Oryza sativa (domesticated rice), and its various cultivars, are the direct descendants of Oryza rufipogon, a wild species of rice still grown …show more content…
So how did rice end up being the main ingredient in a traditional Italian recipe? Well, the majority of rice grown in Italy are sub-species of the japonica cultivar, which would indicate that Italian rice’s origins were Chinese (Sommella et al. 2013:39). This is backed up by genetic studies that have also traced Italian rice to Northern China (Cai et al. 2013). However, the exact route that rice took from China to Italy is still unclear. Since Italy was only unified during the 19th century, rice may have been introduced to different regions at different times (Ferrero and Vidotto 2010:345). Although rice began to appear in the Italian archaeological record by the first century (Muthukumaran 2014:3), it appears that rice only became a staple crop, rather than a foreign import, centuries later (Ferrero and Vidotto