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Polenta Frite
Fried mush can be used to good advantage in many dishes that usually have toast, or fried bread or fried potato garnishes, but in the guileless form of the common breakfast fried mush, it is open to the same objection that Brillat-Savarin brings against the potato; he says: "I never take any. I think nothing of the potato unless as a stop-gap in times of great scarcity. It is, to my taste, most insipid." Therefore resort should be had to the gastronome's expedient in many similar cases; slice the mush thin, cut the shapes small, and mix minced cheese with the cracker meal to bread it with. The proportion of cheese is about one cupful, finely minced, to three cupfuls of cracker meal, but it must depend upon the quality of the cheese. Needs extra care in frying, as it soon acquires a deep color.
Polenta, a 1'Italienne.
A cake of buttered mush, with cheese baked on the top. 1 quart of water. 6 ounces of yellow corn meal. 2 ounces of butter. 4 ounces of cheese, minced. Level teaspoonful of salt and pepper mixed. Half cupful of cracker meal.
Brush the inside of a small saucepan slightly with melted butter, and make mush with the water and meal in the usual way, letting it cook with a lid on, in its own steam, on the furthest corner of the range, about 2 hours. Then stir in half the butter and the pepper and salt. It should be a stiff, well-cooked mush. Spread the other ounce of butter on the baking pan bottom--a 2 qt., bright, shallow milk-pan is best--sift half the cracker meal on that, then place the mush by spoonfuls so as to smooth it over at last without disturbing the under crust. When leveled over, strew on the minced cheese, sift rest of cracker meal on top, and bake in a brisk oven half an hour, or till nicely browned at top and bottom. This is a good dish for lunch. May be served like macaroni and cheese, or macaroni cake. Is best baked en caisse, that is, in little paper cases.
When the cheese furnished is too dry to melt in the oven, moisten the top with the back of a spoon dipped in melted butter. When too rich and melting, use less, and more cracker meal.
Two related dishes on one page: cornmeal mush breaded with cheese and cracker meal and fried, then a baked polenta cake. Both hinge on mush cooked stiff enough to hold a cut edge.
- Weigh the meal6 ounces of yellow corn meal is a scant cup and a quarter, and against a full quart of water that is a loose ratio by modern habit. Cook it down hard, or start with 3 cups of water and add more only if it stiffens too fast.
- "Furthest corner of the range"On a wood or coal range this was the coolest spot, used for long unattended cooking. The modern equivalent is the lowest burner setting with a heat diffuser, or a covered bowl over simmering water. Two hours is not excessive for coarse stone-ground meal; fine degerminated cornmeal is done in 30 to 45 minutes and instant polenta in five.
- Brisk ovenRead that as somewhere around 400 to 425F; the period term is not precise. The half hour given is plausible at that heat for a shallow pan, since the object is browning the crust top and bottom, not cooking anything through.
- Cracker mealFinely ground plain soda or water crackers, unsalted or lightly salted. Crushed saltines pulsed to a sandy crumb are the closest thing on a supermarket shelf; panko is coarser and browns differently. If you use salted crackers, cut back the salt in the mush.
- The cheese browns before the crust doesThis is the warning behind "needs extra care in frying." A cheese-and-cracker coating colors much faster than plain crumbs, so fry at a moderate temperature, around 340 to 350F, and expect the pieces to look done before they are heated through. Thin slices and small shapes, as the text says, solve that.
- Chill before slicingThis applies to the fried mush, which must be cold and firm to slice thin and cut into small shapes. The baked polenta is spread into the pan hot, by spoonfuls. Cold, firm mush also absorbs less fat in the pan.
- Cheese to useThe recipe adjusts for cheese that is "too dry to melt" or "too rich and melting", which suggests the cook could not count on a consistent product. A firm aged cheddar or a dry Parmesan-type grating cheese behaves predictably; fresh mozzarella and other high-moisture cheeses will weep.
- En caisseBaked in small paper cases, that is, individual portions in parchment or paper molds set on a tray. Muffin papers in a tin do the same job and give more browned surface per serving.
- YieldA quart of water and 6 ounces of meal makes a shallow 2-quart pan, which serves four to six as a lunch dish or eight as a garnish cut into small shapes.
Polenta is simply the Italian name for a boiled meal porridge, older than maize in Europe: the Roman puls was made from emmer or barley, and the word carried over to cornmeal after maize arrived from the Americas and became the staple of northern Italy. What is interesting here is the direction of travel. This American book treats fried mush, an unglamorous breakfast plate throughout the nineteenth-century United States, as the humble version of a dish that becomes respectable once it is called polenta and given cheese and a French phrase or two. The Brillat-Savarin quotation on the potato is doing the same work: the author's argument is that a cheap starch is only insipid if the cook leaves it plain, and that slicing small, breading well and browning hard is what separates a garnish from a chore. "Polenta frite" and "polenta a l'Italienne" on a menu card were, in practice, yesterday's cornmeal mush out of the pantry.