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Italian Polenta
This is an Italian and American dish, made from Indian cornflour in America and Italy, but in England semolina is used for the purpose. Four ounces will thicken a quart of milk; the semolina is stirred into it when the milk is on the point of boiling, and simmered for about ten minutes after. Throw the polenta into a dish to get cold; cut it into slices, powder it thickly with grated Parmesan, moisten it with oil or clarified butter, and bake. Serve quite hot, with more cheese on a separate dish. Time, half an hour to bake. Probable cost, exclusive of cheese, 5d.
A gratin of set semolina or cornmeal, sliced and baked under Parmesan. The instructions are sound; the main gaps are setting time, oven heat and the fact that the two grains named behave very differently.
- "Indian cornflour" means cornmealIndian meal or Indian cornflour is ground maize, not the fine white cornstarch sold as cornflour in Britain today. If you make this with true polenta, use a medium-grind cornmeal.
- The two grains are not interchangeable in timeSemolina thickens in the ten minutes given. Cornmeal needs 30 to 45 minutes of slow cooking, or the finished slices will be gritty. Quick-cook polenta will manage in about five.
- The ratioFour ounces to a quart is roughly 115 g grain to a little over a litre of milk (an imperial quart is about 1,140 ml), so nearer 1:10 by weight. That is still a firm set, which is what you want for slicing. Salt the milk; the recipe never says to, and unsalted polenta with only cheese on top tastes flat.
- Stir, and keep stirringRain the grain into the milk in a thin stream while whisking, then stir more or less continuously over low heat. Milk-based polenta scorches on the bottom far faster than water-based, and a burnt note will carry through the whole dish.
- "Throw into a dish to get cold" means several hoursPour it about 2 cm deep into an oiled tray and let it set until genuinely cold and firm, ideally refrigerated for two hours or overnight. Warm polenta will not slice cleanly.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. Bake at 400F (200C) for the half hour specified, arranging the slices overlapping in a buttered dish; finish under the grill if the top has not browned.
- Oil or clarified butterClarified butter is presumably given because whole butter is more likely to scorch over a half-hour bake. Ordinary olive oil does the same job.
- YieldA quart of milk makes enough for four as a substantial side or light supper dish, two or three as a main. The 5d costing is late-Victorian retail and has no modern equivalent.
Polenta as a name attaches to the grain porridge rather than to maize in particular: the Latin puls and polenta described barley and spelt mashes eaten long before maize crossed the Atlantic, Columbus having carried it back in the 1490s. Northern Italy took up corn gradually, spreading widely only from the eighteenth century, and by the nineteenth century polenta was the staple carbohydrate of the Veneto and Lombardy, cheap enough to be associated with rural poverty and, in its unrelieved form, with pellagra. Cassell's entry is interesting for what it admits: English cooks were not expected to source cornmeal, so semolina stands in. The sliced-and-gratinated treatment is authentic enough, being the standard Italian use for the previous day's leftover polenta, though the milk base and the reliance on Parmesan alone make this a distinctly anglicised version.