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Polenta (Indian Meal)
3/4 of a cup of yellow Indian meal (fine) 3 cups of water Put the water into a granite or iron saucepan, add salt. When it begins to boil add the Indian meal, little by little. Keep stirring constantly as you pour it in, to prevent lumps. Boil for one-half hour, stirring constantly over a moderate fire. If desired, a little more water may be added if preferred not so thick. Add grated cheese and butter.
A bare-bones polenta of the kind Italian-American cookbooks printed for readers who had never seen cornmeal cooked any way but as mush. A few notes on proportions and terms.
- Indian meal is cornmeal"Indian meal" was the standard American term for cornmeal in 1912. "Fine" here means a finely ground yellow meal rather than the coarse-grind polenta sold today; coarse grind will need closer to 40-45 minutes and more water.
- The ratio is thinThree cups of water to three-quarters of a cup of meal is 4:1 by volume, which gives a soft, spoonable polenta rather than one that sets firm enough to slice. For a firm polenta to cool and cut, work closer to 3:1.
- Add the meal to boiling water in a streamThis is the hinge. Pour slowly with one hand while whisking with the other; meal dumped in at once seizes into lumps that never disperse. Some cooks whisk the meal into cold water first and bring it up to heat, which is more forgiving.
- "Moderate fire" on a stovetopMedium-low. The polenta should blip rather than boil hard once thickened, as it spits scalding starch. A heat diffuser or a heavy pot helps.
- Granite ware"Granite" means graniteware, enamelled steel with a speckled finish. Any heavy-bottomed pot serves; polenta catches and scorches easily in a thin one.
- Stirring constantlyHalf an hour of unbroken stirring is the traditional method and does produce a smoother result, but stirring every few minutes with a good scrape of the bottom is adequate for a fine meal.
- Salt and finishAbout a teaspoon of salt for three cups of water. The cheese is unspecified: grated Parmesan is the usual choice, a generous handful, with a tablespoon or two of butter beaten in off the heat.
- YieldServes two to three as a side dish, or two as a light supper with sauce or braised meat over it.
Polenta long predates maize in Italy — the word descends from Latin polenta, hulled or crushed barley meal, related to pollen, fine flour, and the Romans ate a boiled porridge of their own called puls — but American corn, arriving in Europe in the sixteenth century, took the name over entirely and became the staple grain of the Veneto, Lombardy and Friuli. This recipe comes from Simple Italian Cookery (1912), one of the earliest English-language books to present Italian home cooking to an American audience, and its parenthetical gloss "(Indian Meal)" does the work of the whole book: it tells the reader that the strange foreign dish is made from something already in her pantry. The porridge she knew as cornmeal mush was the same thing, minus the cheese and butter.