Cook 2 cups of white dried beans with salt and pepper until very soft; press through a colander. Fry 1 onion in 2 tablespoonfuls of butter until brown; mix with the beans. Add 1 tablespoonful of vinegar, 1 teaspoonful of made mustard, some lemon-juice and 2 tablespoonfuls of molasses. Let all get very hot and serve with pork roast.
A bean purée despite the name — there is no cornmeal here at all. The recipe assumes you know how to soak and boil dried beans, and gives no yield or timing, so a few numbers help.
- Soak firstTwo cups of dried white beans (cannellini, navy or Great Northern) want an overnight soak, then 60–90 minutes at a bare simmer until they collapse under a spoon. "Very soft" is not a suggestion: undercooked beans will not go through a colander.
- Salt timingThe original salts at the start. Older kitchen lore held that early salting slows softening, though that is disputed and modern testing finds little effect. Season the finished purée again after the vinegar and molasses go in — acid and sweetness both blunt salt.
- "Press through a colander"This is a coarse purée, not a smooth one. A food mill or the back of a ladle against a wide sieve reproduces the texture; a food processor gives something slicker and pastier than intended. Save a ladle of the cooking liquid to loosen it.
- Made mustardPrepared mustard from a jar, not mustard powder. A smooth Dijon or a plain yellow both work; the point is the vinegar already in it.
- MolassesTwo tablespoons is a real amount and will push the dish toward the sweet-sour register of Boston baked beans. Use unsulphured molasses rather than blackstrap, which turns bitter against the vinegar.
- Finishing"Let all get very hot" means reheating the purée gently in the pan with the fried onion and seasonings, stirring, until it steams through — five minutes or so. It will thicken as it sits, so add water or bean liquor to keep it spoonable.
- YieldTwo cups of dried beans gives roughly five to six cups cooked; enough as a side dish for six, which is about right alongside a pork roast.
The title, which survives here mainly in the file slug rather than in the recipe text itself, is the puzzle: polenta in Italian usage means a boiled meal porridge, and while maize polenta has dominated since the eighteenth century, the word was applied earlier and more loosely to thick pottages of other ground pulses and grains — chestnut, chickpea, farro. A dried-bean purée served hot with roast pork sits comfortably in that older, wider sense. What is less Italian is the seasoning. Vinegar, prepared mustard and two tablespoons of molasses belong to the American sweet-and-sour bean tradition, and their presence is characteristic of the "dishes of all nations" genre that flourished in English-language cookbooks. These day-by-day compilations promised a year of foreign cooking, and the national label was attached to a dish that had already been thoroughly translated for the American table.