Home › The Principles of Cookery › Rolls, Polenta
Rolls, Polenta
Polenta is the name under which Italian flour or maize is sold at the foreign warehouses in this country. It is much superior in quality to that which is imported from America, and is harvested with more care; but its consumption here is comparatively small, and it is sold at a price which must, while it is maintained, prevent its general use for bread, of which it makes a pleasant variety when it is mixed with twice the quantity of wheaten flour. Blend intimately in an earthen pan one pint of the polenta with a quart of the best flour, and rather less than the usual proportion of salt. Dilute gradually a dessert-spoonful of solid yeast, or half an ounce of German yeast, with a pint of warm new milk (a few spoonfuls more than this quantity may be required, but it is better not to add it at first), and make the dough up at once. Let it be firm without being hard, as it will become lithe in rising. Leave it covered with a cloth until it appears quite light; then knead it down thoroughly, and let it again stand to rise. Divide it into large rolls, place them some distance apart on a floured tin, and bake them in a moderate oven from three-quarters of an hour to an hour. The polenta imparts a pleasant flavour to this bread, which eats almost like rice-cake, which it may be made to resemble still further by dissolving an ounce of butter in the milk with which it is mixed. (See also POLENTA.)
A Victorian maize-and-wheat roll, worked as a straight dough with a long double rise. The proportions translate cleanly once the volume measures and the yeast are sorted out.
- What polenta means hereNot the cooked dish but the dry meal: finely ground Italian maize, sold loose at import warehouses. Use a fine or medium polenta/cornmeal, not the quick-cooking instant sort, which has been precooked and will behave differently in a dough.
- Volume measuresAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, a quart 40 fl oz, so the ratio is one part meal to two parts flour by volume, exactly as the text says ("mixed with twice the quantity of wheaten flour"). The milk is a further imperial pint, about 570 ml. Measure by volume rather than converting to weight, since meal and flour differ in density.
- German yeastCompressed fresh baker's yeast. Half an ounce is about 14 g; substitute roughly 1½ teaspoons instant dried yeast. "Solid yeast" appears to mean yeast drained or pressed of its liquid rather than poured as barm; the recipe treats the two as interchangeable, so fresh or instant yeast will serve.
- New milkFresh whole milk, warmed to blood heat as the recipe specifies. Modern pasteurised milk needs only warming.
- The hinge: hydrationCornmeal absorbs liquid slowly and keeps taking it up during the first rise. The instruction to hold back the extra milk is sound — a dough that feels firm at mixing will slacken noticeably by the time it is knocked back.
- Oven and timingA moderate oven is usually taken to be somewhere around 350°F (180°C). Three-quarters of an hour to an hour only makes sense for the "large rolls" specified, each closer to a small loaf; bake until the centre reaches about 200°F (93°C). Smaller dinner-roll sizes will be done well before that time.
- The butter variationMelting an ounce of butter into the milk enriches and softens the crumb; the recipe offers it as a way of making the bread resemble rice-cake still more closely. Best eaten fresh.
Polenta bread appears in English cookery books as an economy that never quite became one. The passage's own complaint — that Italian maize meal was better harvested than the American import but priced too high for general use as bread — reflects the nineteenth-century grain trade, in which cheap American maize came into Britain largely for feed and industrial starch while the finer continental meal remained a specialist import. Wording of this kind circulated widely between compilers, and closely similar phrasing occurs in Eliza Acton, who pressed the case for mixed-grain loaves at a time when white wheaten bread was the mark of respectability; the direct line of borrowing here cannot be established from the text alone. The comparison to rice-cake is telling: maize was understood in Britain less as a bread grain in its own right than as something to be judged against the puddings and cakes it most resembled.