No. 2974

Polenta

A dried and crushed corn resembling semolina. Have a quart of water boiling in a saucepan, drop in like rain one pound and a half of polenta; boil for a few moments, adding a little salt and three ounces of butter, then stir in briskly a little grated parmesan. When cooked, pour it into mousseline molds (No. 2, Fig. 138), previously coated with meat glaze (No. 402); when the polenta is hard, unmold, or else have the molds buttered, and when the polenta is thoroughly cold unmold and cut each one into slices; spread a little melted butter and grated parmesan between each, then restore them to their respective positions; remold and place in the oven for twenty-five to thirty minutes, then unmold and serve with a cream sauce (No. 454).

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's polenta is not the soft bowl of porridge the word suggests now: it is set firm in molds, sliced, layered with butter and parmesan, remolded and baked. Two things in the text need correcting before it will work.

The water is far too littleA pound and a half of dried corn meal is roughly 4½ cups, and a quart of water is 4 cups — near 1:1, which will seize into a dry lump before the grain hydrates. Coarse polenta wants three to four times its volume in liquid; for a firm, sliceable set aim at the lower end, around 1 cup meal to 3 cups water, and scale the butter and cheese to whatever quantity you actually cook.
"Boil for a few moments" is not the cooking timeTraditional coarse-ground polenta needs 35 to 45 minutes of low, frequent stirring to lose its raw, sandy bite; medium grind takes about 25. Quick-cooking or instant polenta is genuinely done in 5 to 8 minutes and is the closest modern shortcut, though it sets less firmly.
Raining it in"Drop in like rain" is the whole technique for avoiding lumps — a thin steady stream into boiling salted water with the whisk moving constantly. A dumped handful will form skinned pellets that never soften.
Meat glaze (No. 402)Glace de viande: brown stock reduced to a syrup that sets to rubber when cold. Commercial demi-glace or reduced veal stock does the same job. It is used here only to line the molds, giving the turned-out shapes a dark savory coating; buttering the molds instead, as the recipe allows, is simpler.
Cream sauce (No. 454)A béchamel-type white sauce enriched with cream. Nothing exotic is intended.
Mousseline moldsSmall straight-sided dariole or timbale molds. Ramekins or a muffin tin work. The polenta must be completely cold and firm before slicing, or the layers will collapse.
Oven for the final bakeNo temperature is given in the text. A moderate oven, 350F, for the stated 25 to 30 minutes will heat the remolded towers through and melt the cheese between the slices.
YieldAs written the quantity is enormous. A batch made from 1 cup of meal fills about four 5 oz molds and serves four as a side dish or first course.

A Little History

Polenta in Ranhofer's sense is northern Italian, and one of its familiar forms is firm and sliceable: cooked stiff, turned out onto a board, left to cool, then cut and grilled, fried or baked. Maize reached Italy in the sixteenth century and by the eighteenth had become the staple grain of the Veneto, Lombardy and Friuli, so thoroughly that pellagra — a niacin deficiency caused by living almost entirely on untreated corn — took hold there, having been described in Lombardy from the 1770s. What appears in The Epicurean (1894) is that peasant staple put through the machinery of a Delmonico's kitchen: lined with meat glaze, interleaved with parmesan, molded into individual towers and sauced. Ranhofer files it among the "farinaceous" dishes, the course of pastas and grains that a formal American menu of the period borrowed from Italian and French practice, and his brisk opening definition — "a dried and crushed corn resembling semolina" — tells you he expected his readers not to know the word.