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Italian Polenta Croquettes
Make corn meal mush as above, but stir in a little butter and grated cheese when it's done. Then take this richer mush out in the same way, by tablespoonfuls, but lay it on a cold flat surface, such as an old slab of marble, and shape into egg-like ovals. Cover each with a thin slice of old Wisconsin cheese, pressing it down so it adheres to the corn meal. Let cool, then dip in beaten egg and bread crumbs and fry in deep fat.
A fried polenta croquette built on leftover mush, with the recipe leaning on an earlier cornmeal entry for the base. A few specifics are worth pinning down before you start.
- The mush baseThe recipe leans on an earlier cornmeal entry not given here. A workable base is roughly 1 cup coarse cornmeal to 4 cups water with a teaspoon of salt, stirred over low heat until it pulls cleanly from the side of the pan; then stir in butter and grated cheese off the heat, to taste, as the text only says "a little" of each.
- The hinge: chill it hardThe hinge: cool it thoroughly -- The recipe shapes the ovals warm on the cold slab, then says to let them cool before breading. Cool them until cold and firm all the way through; a spell in the refrigerator makes them much less likely to burst in the fat.
- "An old slab of marble"Any cold, non-absorbent surface works. A parchment-lined sheet pan straight from the refrigerator does the same job and lets you move the whole batch at once.
- Old Wisconsin cheeseThis reads as a well-aged yellow cheddar, sharp and dry rather than a young rindless block. A thin slice pressed onto the oval, as the recipe directs, melts into a layer just under the breading.
- Breading that stays onDust the chilled ovals with flour before the egg, then crumbs. Straight egg on damp cornmeal tends to slip in the fat and open a leak for the cheese.
- Frying temperature365-375F, in enough fat to float them, three or four at a time so the temperature holds. They need only 2-3 minutes to color, since everything inside is already cooked.
- YieldTaken by tablespoonfuls as the recipe directs, a cup of dry cornmeal makes several dozen small ovals; the exact count depends on how generous the spoonful is. They are best within minutes of draining.
Polenta is simply cornmeal mush under its Italian name. Maize crossed from the Americas in the sixteenth century, but cornmeal polenta only became a staple of northern Italian cooking over the following two centuries, gradually displacing older porridges of millet, chestnut and buckwheat. Frying cold slabs or shapes of leftover porridge is a traditional second life for a polenta pot, and stuffing them with cheese puts this recipe in the same family as Roman supplì and Sicilian arancini, where a starch casing hides a molten center. The call for "old Wisconsin cheese" rather than an Italian one marks the dish as American: Wisconsin was the country's leading cheese producer by the early twentieth century, and its cheddar was widely sold as the sharp cheese of the national grocery trade.