Venice Recipes and Curiosities
from the Venetian Cuisine

Risi e Bisi

Rice & Peas

Ingredients:

peas

onion

olive oil

parsley

salt and pepper

Arborio rice

stock-cube bouillon

butter

grated parmisian cheese

Modus Operandi

Brown the onion in the oil, add small and sweet peas (even frozen, or from can but taking care to drop all of the liquid), let them flavour and add parsley, salt and pepper. Cook them to the right point.
...And we already have, here, an excellent side dish.

Now we put the flavoured peas in a risotto baking tin, add the rice and make it flavour, then slowly add the hot bouillon, continuously stirring the risotto with the same holed ladle used for creams.

When the rice will be cooked, add the butter and parmisan, creaming.

Risi, Bisi e Fragoe

Rice, Peas and Strawberries

In the 800“s Venetia, risi, bisi e fragoe (white, green and red) was the gastronomic equivalent of the cry Viva Verdi against the Austro-Ungarian Occupants. Up with VERDI, the name of the composer, but also an acronym for Vittorio Emanuele Re d“Italia - Vittorio Emanuele (Savoia) King of Italy

Here is a "limerick" from the times of our great-grandfathers:
risi, bisi e fragoe, erbette rave cotte, tempesta sue Sątare e piova al Redentor.
Or: "Rice, peas and strawberries, stewed sweet turnips, storm on the Zattere and rain on the Redentore". Rain usually never miss the Redentore Holiday, at least two drops... The turnips are red and whites, their leaves are green: the colors of the Italian Flag; probably the limerick wants to hand down the memory of an independentists rebellion occurred in the Zattere area.

If it is fairly probable that the same Risi e Bisi might be a dish from Austro-Hungarian cuisine, like all courses based on sweet pumpkin and rice and potatoes, which are infact observable in the cookery of all Italic Historical Centres that were subject to that Empire, for the risi e bisi they seem to exhist evidences of presents of this dish to the Doge from paysants of the islands, in times far before 1807.