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Polenta Croquettes
Boil one-half cup of corn-meal rather hard, and before removing from the fire add a piece of butter and a little grated cheese and mix well. Take it then by spoonfuls and let it fall onto a marble-top table, or a bread-pan which has been wet a little with cold water. These spoonfuls should form little balls about the size of a hen's egg. On each of these croquettes place a very thin slice of gruyere cheese, so that the cheese will adhere to the corn-meal. Then allow them to cool, and when cold dip into egg, then into bread crumbs, and fry in boiling lard.
A stiff polenta shaped around a chip of cheese, breaded and deep-fried. The recipe assumes you already know how to cook polenta, so the proportions and the cooling step are left unsaid.
- "Boil rather hard"This means a very stiff polenta, firm enough to hold a shape off the spoon. Something in the region of three to four parts water to one part cornmeal by volume, cooked and stirred until it pulls away from the sides of the pan; the recipe gives no proportion or time, so judge it by consistency. Instant polenta will work but sets softer and holds the cheese less well.
- Corn-mealItalian polenta meal is medium-grind yellow corn. Fine cornmeal turns pasty and degerminated supermarket meal is thin in flavour; a coarse or medium stone-ground meal will give the firmer result the method needs.
- The cooling is the hingeThe balls must be completely cold and firm before they go anywhere near egg and crumbs. Warm polenta sags, sheds its coating, and bursts in the fat. An hour in the refrigerator, uncovered, is better than the counter.
- Marble slab or wet panBoth are simply non-stick surfaces of their day. A sheet pan rinsed with cold water, or lined with parchment, does the same job.
- The cheese sliceA thin slice of Gruyère is pressed onto each ball and then sealed under the coating. Tuck it into the centre rather than leaving it on the surface if you want it to melt without leaking; a Fontina or young Asiago behaves similarly.
- "Boiling lard"Lard never boils at frying heat; the phrase means fat hot enough to bubble briskly around the food, about 350-375F. Deep enough to float the croquettes, and fry in small batches so the temperature holds. Any neutral frying oil substitutes.
- YieldHalf a cup of meal makes something on the order of eight to ten egg-sized croquettes -- a few servings as an antipasto or a side, not a main course.
Polenta is the northern Italian staple built on maize, which arrived in Europe from the Americas in the sixteenth century and by the eighteenth had largely displaced older millet and buckwheat porridges across the Veneto, Lombardy and Piedmont. Leftover polenta was rarely wasted: poured out to set firm, then sliced and grilled, or, as here, rolled and fried.