Polenta and Cheese
INGREDIENTS.-Cold maize meal porridge, grated cheese, butter or oil, salt and cayenne.
Cut the polenta into squares about to inch in thickness, and arrange them in a pie-dish, with grated cheese between and over the top. Put over a few small pieces of butter, or a little oil, and bake in a quick oven till brown. Serve very hot, with freshly-made toast.
A thrifty way with leftover polenta that needs almost nothing said about it, except for the two things Beeton assumes you already know: how the porridge was made and how hot the oven runs.
- "Maize meal porridge"Coarse or medium cornmeal cooked in salted water until thick, then poured out to set firm — roughly 1 part meal to 4 parts water by volume, cooked 30-45 minutes with stirring, or use instant polenta. It must be poured into a shallow tray and left cold and firm before it will slice.
- A quick oven425-450F. High heat is the point: it browns the cheese and crisps the cut faces before the polenta has time to dry out. Fifteen to twenty minutes is usually enough.
- The garbled thicknessThe text has lost a number — "about to inch" was almost certainly "about half an inch" or "about an inch." Half an inch slices give a better ratio of crust to interior.
- Pie-dishAny shallow ovenproof dish. Layer the squares slightly overlapping rather than stacking them deep, or the middle stays cold while the top browns.
- The cheeseThe recipe says only "grated cheese". Cheshire and Cheddar were common English grating cheeses of the period, and Parmesan appears frequently in Victorian baked cheese dishes; Parmesan, Gruyere or a mix all work. A dry aged cheese browns better than a young one, which weeps fat.
- CayenneA pinch, dusted with the salt over each layer; the recipe gives no quantity. Cayenne turns up often in Victorian cheese dishes.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a guide, porridge made from about 8 oz of cornmeal will roughly fill a medium pie-dish, enough for about four as a light supper dish.
Polenta arrived in English cookery books as a frugal foreign curiosity, and Beeton treats it exactly as her readers treated cold porridge or leftover semolina: slice, layer with cheese, brown. The cornmeal itself is a New World grain that spread through northern Italy from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and became the staple there over the generations that followed; the word polenta is older than maize, having named grain porridges before it attached to this one. The company this entry keeps among other economical uses for cold food says something about the book's real subject - not Italian cooking but the management of a kitchen in which nothing edible was thrown away.