Riso al forno with peas, mozzarella, and cooked ham

My mother's riso al forno appeared on the table roughly once a fortnight and was, structurally, an audit of the fridge.

The rice was the only fixed element. Everything else was whatever had accumulated over the previous ten days: the end of a ball of mozzarella, a handful of peas, the last four slices of cooked ham going slightly dry at the edges, sometimes a hard-boiled egg cut into rounds, and once, memorably, a small quantity of leftover ragù that changed the character of the dish completely and was never repeated. She would layer it all into a dish, cover the top with breadcrumbs, and bake it until it went brown.

I did not know until I was about twenty-five that this was a real dish, with a name, made deliberately, by people, on purpose. I had assumed it was something my mother had improvised to deal with a fridge. It turns out that riso al forno is standard across most of southern Italy, and that a great many mothers had independently arrived at the same solution to the same problem, which is what a traditional dish actually is once you look at it closely.

What earns it a page here is the texture. Baked rice is not risotto and is not attempting to be. The grains stay separate, the cheese binds them, and the whole thing sets firm enough to cut. A square of riso al forno may be the single best-engineered object in this book for a lunchbox: it holds its shape, it cannot leak, it is good cold, and it reheats without the drying out that plain rice always suffers.

Boil the rice in plenty of salted water like pasta, not by absorption. Absorption rice arrives at the oven already starchy and comes out of it gluey.