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Corn Meal with Sausages
(Polenta con salsicce) Cook in water one cup of yellow cornmeal making a stiff mush. Salt it well and when it is cooked spread out to cool on a bread board about half an inch thick. Then cut the mush into small squares.
Put in a saucepan several whole sausages with a little water, and when they are cooked skin and crush them and add some brown stock or tomato sauce.
Put the polenta (or cornmeal mush) in a fireproof receptacle, season with grated cheese, the crushed sausages and a piece of butter. Put it in the oven and serve when hot. 37
A one-cup measure of cornmeal and no oven temperature is typical of the book's shorthand; the technique is standard polenta pasticciata, and it rewards patience at the first stage.
- The hinge: cook the polenta long enoughOne cup of coarse yellow cornmeal to about four cups of salted water, whisked in slowly, then stirred over low heat for 40-45 minutes. Undercooked polenta tastes raw and chalky no matter how much sausage and cheese go over it; instant polenta will work in 5 minutes but sets softer.
- "Stiff mush"It should pull away from the sides of the pan and hold a spoon upright. That firmness is what lets it cool on the board and cut cleanly into squares without crumbling.
- Cooling and cuttingSpread it half an inch thick on a wet board or an oiled sheet pan and leave it at least an hour, or until fully cold. Warm polenta will smear under the knife. Cut into squares of an inch or two.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Around 350F for 20-30 minutes will do; the dish is already cooked and only needs to heat through and brown at the edges.
- The sausagesFresh Italian pork sausage, plain or with fennel, is the likely intention. Simmering them in a little water first steams them through and renders some fat; about 15 minutes for standard links, after which the casings slip off easily.
- Brown stockA period term for a long-simmered beef or veal stock, reduced and dark. Any good beef stock reduced by half stands in, or use the tomato sauce alternative the recipe offers.
- The cheeseGrated Parmigiano or a hard grana. Layer it, rather than dumping it on top: polenta squares, sausage and sauce, cheese, repeat, with the butter dotted over the last layer.
- YieldOne cup of cornmeal and several sausages makes a modest dish: two or three as a main course, four as a first course. It reheats well.
Polenta pasticciata - loosely, polenta 'muddled' or made into a pasticcio, layered with meat, sauce and cheese and baked - is a standard northern Italian answer to the question of what to do with yesterday's polenta, which sets hard as it cools and cuts like a board. Maize reached Italy from the Americas in the sixteenth century and by the nineteenth had become the staple grain of the Veneto, Lombardy and Friuli, eaten daily and often to the exclusion of much else. This version comes from Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919), one of a wave of English-language Italian cookbooks published in the United States for a readership that had grown large and curious through immigration.