Risotto with sausage and savoy cabbage

There is a line across Italy, somewhere around Florence, north of which people stop asking what pasta you want and start asking what rice you want.

Italy is the largest rice producer in Europe, which surprises anybody who has only met the country through pizza. The paddies sit in the flat country between Milan, Novara and Vercelli. They flood in spring and turn the whole plain into a shallow mirror full of frogs and herons, and they have been there since the fifteenth century. Everything about northern Italian cooking follows from that fact. Butter rather than olive oil. Rice rather than pasta. And risotto, which is a technique that exists nowhere else in Europe for the simple reason that nowhere else in Europe had the rice.

This is a winter risotto built around the two things a northern Italian kitchen has in February: a pork sausage and a savoy cabbage. The sausage renders its fat at the start and that fat then cooks the onion, which means the entire pot is built on it rather than on butter. The cabbage goes in early and cooks down long enough to turn sweet.

The thing nobody tells you about risotto is that it is not difficult, it simply demands attention for eighteen consecutive minutes, which is a different kind of problem and a harder one on a Tuesday. You cannot walk away. You can listen to something, and the eighteen minutes pass quickly once you accept them instead of resenting them.

Leftover risotto sets solid in the fridge, and that is a feature rather than a fault. Roll it into balls around a cube of mozzarella, coat them in breadcrumbs and fry them, and you have arancini, which is comfortably the best thing anybody has ever done with a leftover.