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Rachel Roddy’s recipe for rice with pumpkin, chestnuts, sage and butter | A Kitchen in Rome


It is such a good time of year for fruit and vegetables. Pumpkins and squash, the rabble of roots and their greens, the first fennel and the last grapes, freckled apples, pears and fuzzy-felt quinces, wild and tame mushrooms, pomegranates, green-black kale and red-stalked chard, the first artichokes and green-tinted citrus, smooth, chocolate brown chestnuts: with all this to wear, no wonder the market, corner shop and supermarket shelves look so gorgeous. The changeable weather – sun, then scudding clouds that arrive full of rain and inevitable humidity in between – just serves to exacerbate the scent and fruitfulness of it all. A scent that lingers long after you have left the market or the shop … especially the apples – why is it that apples smell so strongly and persistently?

Strong and persistent is the pleasure I get from putting autumn produce in its place, ripping open nets of chestnuts or mandarins and watching them skittle in a bowl, attempting my own private Caravaggio with two pomegranates, three pears and a quince that may never get cooked, and putting the pumpkin on the shelf like an ornament. I get less pleasure from cutting pumpkin, having almost lost a finger last year. “You must woo an autumn squash,” wrote Molly O’Neill in her book A Well Seasoned Appetite. I disagree: you need to discipline them or delegate the task. Scoring chestnuts, on the other hand, I like, because it means we are going to roast them, wrap them in a paper bag and then a tea towel, so the shells come off easily when we eat them with cheap red wine.

You could roast the chestnuts for this recipe, or open a vacuum pack for a most autumnal dish: it’s one of my favourites for this column this year, rice with pumpkin, chestnuts, sage and butter. The ingredients are almost exactly the same as for a pumpkin and chestnut risotto but, unlike risotto, the rice for this dish is cooked separately from the pumpkin and chestnuts and the sage butter is added at the end. While the resulting dish is not as creamy as risotto, the starchy nature of arborio and carnaroli rice mean it is still a soft and deliciously sticky plate of food.

The sage fried in butter is essential. Pumpkin and chestnuts can both teeter on the edge of too sweet, which is where sage – musty, domineering and soaked in butter – steps in, stops the fall and rounds the dish into absolute savouriness. While I have little time for useless aesthetics, I have lots of time for useful ones; sage looks beautiful here.

“La primavera per l’occhio, l’autunno per la bocca” (“spring is for looking, autumn for tasting”) wrote the Italian refugee, humanist and food writer Castelvetro in 1614. He is right, though I would add that autumn is for the looking, too – everyday admiration of the good things wherever we see, buy, arrange, skittle, dominate and eat them.

Rice with pumpkin, chestnuts, sage and butter

250g carnaroli or arborio rice
1 small onion
, peeled and finely chopped
3 tbsp olive oil
50g butter
300g pumpkin or butternut flesh
, cut into small cubes
120g cooked chestnuts, roughly chopped
12 sage leaves
Salt and pepper

Cook the rice in plenty of well salted boiling water, then drain. Set aside and keep warm.

In a large frying pan over a medium/low flame, gently fry the onion in the olive oil and half the butter until starting to soften. Add the pumpkin and a pinch of salt, stir so every cube glistens, then add 100ml water, cover with a lid and cook for 15 minutes, or until the pumpkin is soft and there is just a little liquid.

Add the chestnuts to the pan, stir and cook for a few minutes, then add the rice and stir again. Taste and salt and pepper to taste.

In another pan, melt the butter and fry the sage leaves for 30 seconds, then pour both over the rice, and serve immediately.

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