My father was an enthusiastic traveller, but as he got older he increasingly suffered from what he called “travel fever”, a vivid term for the acute anxiety felt before a journey, essentially due to uncertainty about all the things that could go wrong. Sadly, this eventually stopped him from going on holiday. Then I, too, started to suffer similar apprehension, so I consulted a psychotherapist. She recommended a small piece of cognitive behavioural therapy, which involved acknowledging the mental and physical symptoms of anxiety, but telling myself that these were essentially indistinguishable from feelings of excitement about the prospect of a journey. This reframing of my feelings has been reasonably effective – it’s one way of dealing with uncertainty.
Beer is best served cold, and it turns out that math can help with that. Cláudio de Castro Pellegrini of the Federal University of São João del-Rei in Brazil recently set out to formulate an equation to determine the optimal shape of a beer glass that will keep a beverage tastily chilled—in other words, he was looking for a glass that prevents the liquid in it from absorbing heat.
The good news is that making risotto is a breeze. The fundamental things apply. You melt a bit of butter, sauté some chopped onion, add rice, stir it around, add wine, stir, then add hot stock, ladle by ladle, while you stir and stir again. Remove the pan from the heat. Throw in grated Parmesan and more butter. Stir. Wait. Serve. Eat. Feel your immortal soul being warmed and suffused with pleasures both rare and immeasurable. Lick the spoon. Wash the pan. Done.
On inspection, however, the fundamentals melt away. This is where trouble starts. Some recipes are onion-free. Others drop the wine. As for the dairy products, they ought to be non-negotiable, and I was once advised never to order risotto south of Rome, because that is where butter country peters out. To anyone who can’t or won’t eat anything predicated on the existence of a cow, risotto should surely be off limits. Or so I believed until I met an experimentalist chef, a few years ago, who argued that, when we praise the creaminess of a risotto, all we are really doing is confirming the omnipresence of butter and cheese. His dream was to create a risotto using nothing but stock and rice. Trapped within each grain, he told me, and secretly waiting to be released, was all the texture we would ever need.