In the town of Vercelli, surrounded by golden fields of Arborio and Carnaroli rice, I made the happy acquaintance of panissa.

Our waiter brought antipasti to keep us busy and half an hour later, as promised, we dipped into deeply satisfying bowls of rice mingled with plump beans and sausage, tinted a delicate mauve after simmering in local Barbera wine.

Unlike risotto, its culinary cousin, panissa hasn’t strayed far from home. “Vercelli is in a part of Piemonte that’s not a tourist destination, so even Italian chefs don’t know about it,” says chef Margherita Aloi, a native of the northwestern Italian region who’s chef of Arezzo and Providence.

Along with paniscia, a similar rice dish from a neighboring town, panissa belongs to the cucina povera tradition. It was originally a nourishing one-dish affair eaten by rice field workers, including the mondine--women brought from all over northern Italy because only their hands were small enough for the tasks of planting and weeding.

Meme Amosso Irwin, who teaches Italian at The Johns Hopkins University, returned from a visit to her Piedmont hometown with a panissa recipe containing a generous quantity of Barbera. It was from a cook for the alpini, Italy’s elite alpine troops, and she wondered, “Could this be an addition just for alpini? They put wine even in babies’ bottles, or so it’s said.” Despite her suspicions, every panissa recipe I’ve seen calls for red wine, most often Barbera.

When he makes panissa, Piedmont native Roberto Donna uses his own sausage preserved the traditional way, in lard. “But it’s okay to substitute fresh sausage,” says Donna, chef-owner of Galileo in Washington, D.C. “In fact, that’s what my grandmother used for our Saturday night panissa.”

Cesare Casella, chef/owner of Beppe, notes that some of Italy’s best beans, including the Saluggia beans preferred for panissa, come from the same region.

Aloi’s version of panissa goes heavy on beans and, in spring, she also puts together a “cleansing’ soup of Italian rice and spring greens: dandelions, spinach, even pansies. For generations, the women in her family have made this vitamin-rich soup, believed to help the immune system cope with changeable spring weather.

Like panissa, it’s a meal for working people. “People went to the land and didn’t have time to prepare dinner every day,” says Aloi. We still don’t have time for that, so make a batch and if there’s any left, you’ll find it waiting like a good friend the next night.

Featured Recipes: Panissa "a Modo Mio"
                                  Spring Greens and Rice Soup

Originally published in the Daily News, April 13, 2005