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Polenta Pasticciata
3/4 of a cup of Indian meal 1 quart of milk Boil the milk, and add the Indian meal, a little at a time, when milk is boiling, stirring constantly. Cook for one-half an hour, stirring constantly. Add salt just before taking off the fire. The Indian meal should be stiff when finished. Turn it onto the bread-board, and spread it out to the thickness of two fingers. While it is cooking prepare a meat sauce, and a Be-chamel sauce as follows:
This is the first half of a two-part dish: the page gives the polenta and then breaks off before the sauces it promises. Anyone cooking from it needs a meat sauce and a béchamel already in hand.
- Indian mealIndian meal is cornmeal. Use a medium or coarse yellow grind, not instant polenta and not fine degerminated meal, which turns pasty rather than setting into a sliceable slab.
- The proportion is looseThree-quarters of a cup of meal to a quart of milk is thin by modern standards, where a ratio nearer 1 part meal to 4 parts liquid by volume is common. You may need more meal than the recipe gives to reach the "stiff" stage it insists on.
- Milk onlyCooking polenta entirely in milk gives a soft, sweet, custardy result but scorches easily. Use a heavy pan, keep the heat low once the meal is in, and stir with a wooden spoon across the bottom rather than around the sides.
- Salt at the endThe recipe holds the salt until just before the pan comes off the fire. Salt generously at that point, since the polenta will be layered with sauces.
- Half an hour of stirringThat is a fair minimum for medium grind. Judge by texture, not the clock. The mass is done when it pulls away from the pan sides and a spoon stood in it stays upright.
- "Thickness of two fingers"Roughly an inch to an inch and a half. Spread the hot polenta on a wet board or an oiled sheet pan, smooth the top, and let it cool completely, at least an hour, before cutting. Warm polenta will not slice cleanly.
- What pasticciata means in practiceThe slices are layered in a buttered dish with meat sauce, bechamel and grated Parmesan, finished with cheese and butter on top, and baked until bubbling and browned. The recipe as printed breaks off before this stage and gives no oven instruction.
- YieldThree-quarters of a cup of meal makes a modest slab: enough for about four as a first course, fewer as a main.
Polenta pasticciata — literally "messed-about" or "pasted-up" polenta — is the northern Italian answer to leftovers: yesterday's cooled polenta sliced like bread and layered with whatever sauce and cheese the house has, then baked. Corn arrived in the Veneto and Lombardy in the sixteenth century and by the eighteenth had become the staple starch of the Po valley, where a copper pot of polenta stood in for bread at most meals. That this book calls the cornmeal "Indian meal" places it squarely in the American market: the phrase was the standard English-language term for maize meal from the colonial period until it faded early in the twentieth century, distinguishing it from wheat "meal."