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Polenta with Sausages
(Polenta colle salsicce) The polenta is a very popular dish in Northern Italy and can be prepared in various ways. Always, however, it is better to serve with the addition of sausages, or with birds or tomato paste. The polenta is practically corn-meal and it is made with the so-called farina gialla or yellow flour.
The ingredients for a good polenta are one pound of corn meal, preferably granulous, one quart and a half of water, salted in proportion, one piece of butter, one cup and a half of milk.
Pour the meal little by little into boiling water, continually stirring with a wooden spoon. When the meal is half cooked, put the butter and pour the milk little by little. While the polenta boils, place on the fire in a little saucepan a tablespoonful of olive oil or a small piece of butter. When the oil is hot or the butter is melted, put some sausages repeatedly pricked with a fork.
When the sausages are cooked, pour the polenta hot in a dish and place the sausages and the gravy in a cavity practised in the middle.
Serve hot.
In cooking the sausages two or three bayleaves may be added and removed before serving. 164
A straightforward northern polenta with the sausages and their fat sunk into a well in the centre. The only real skill is in the stirring and in giving the meal enough time.
- The hinge: cook it far longer than you thinkThe recipe never gives a time. Coarse-ground meal needs 40 to 50 minutes of slow, frequent stirring to lose its raw, gritty edge; instant polenta is done in five but will not give the same texture. "Half cooked" here means roughly the 20-minute mark, when the mass has thickened but still slumps.
- Quantities and ratioOne pound of cornmeal is about 3 cups; a quart and a half of water is 6 cups, plus the cup and a half of milk added later, so about 7 1/2 cups of liquid in all. That works out near 2 1/2 parts liquid to 1 part meal by volume, which is stiffer than most modern polenta.
- "Farina gialla" and "granulous"Yellow cornmeal, coarsely ground — sold today as polenta or coarse-grind cornmeal. Avoid fine cornmeal (it goes pasty) and do not substitute masa harina, which is nixtamalised and behaves differently.
- "Salted in proportion"No figure is given. About 1.5 to 2 teaspoons of fine salt per quart of water is the usual modern measure; salt the water before the meal goes in, since polenta takes salt poorly once thickened.
- Adding the mealRain it in slowly with the water at a bare boil while stirring, or whisk it into cold water and then bring it up — the second method is not period but it eliminates lumps entirely. Once thickened, drop the heat to the lowest simmer; polenta spits scalding blobs at a full boil.
- The sausagesItalian coarse pork sausage, plain or with fennel — luganega is the northern type implied. Pricking releases fat to make the "gravy" that dresses the polenta; cook them through to 160F, roughly 15 to 20 minutes over moderate heat, adding a splash of water if the pan dries.
- Butter and milk"One piece of butter" is unspecified; 2 to 3 tablespoons suits this quantity. The milk enriches and loosens the polenta at the same time, so add it gradually and stop when the texture is right rather than using it all.
- Yield and leftoversA pound of meal feeds six to eight generously. Cold polenta sets firm overnight; slice it half an inch thick and grill or fry it, which is the standard northern second life for the dish.
Polenta long predates maize — the word descends from Latin polenta, hulled or pearled barley meal, related to pollen, fine flour; the boiled grain porridge that fed republican Rome, made from farro, millet or chestnut flour, was the separate puls. Maize reached northern Italy in the sixteenth century by way of Spain and the Americas, and by the eighteenth it had taken over the Veneto, Lombardy and Friuli so completely that polentoni, polenta-eaters, became a southern nickname for northerners that survives today. The dominance had a dark side: a diet of little but maize, which locks up its niacin unless treated with lime as in Mesoamerica, produced widespread pellagra across the Po Valley into the twentieth century, which is part of why so many traditional preparations insist on butter, milk, cheese or meat alongside. Maria Gentile's Italian Cook Book of 1919 was written for American home cooks at the height of Italian immigration, and its careful explanation that "the polenta is practically corn-meal" is aimed squarely at a reader who had cornmeal in the pantry but had never met it in this form.