Polenta
Last night, to combat the pervasive rain and gray of a
New England winter, we decorated the Christmas tree, watched a rousing episode
of Survivor, and ate spicy shrimp and andouille sausage with creamy polenta and
green hot pepper sauce.
The sausage and
shrimp ragu is an attention-getter, all dressed up in bright red tomatoes,
peppers and Cajun spices. With the shocking sea-green splash of the
jalapeño sauce on top, this dish is beautifully festive, and hot enough
to keep a slow burn on the lips. The heart of the meal, however, lies
underneath in the polenta.
Polenta is,
very simply, boiled coarsely-ground yellow corn meal. As it cooks, the grains
soften and absorb the liquid – usually water, milk, or broth. It can be
ready in about 15 minutes when it has formed the consistency of cream of wheat,
but purists (consult for instance, the Knights of Polenta – I kid you not)
will continue to cook it, constantly stirring, for up to an hour and a half.
An hour and a
half! The amount of liquid determines how soft
or stiff the polenta will be, though it always thickens as it cools. Three cups
of liquid to one cup of grain will make a creamy consistency; a 2:1 ratio will
set firmer so that it retains its shape in a mold or when sliced. (I must
aside: Polenta and grits are not the same, although both come from corn.
Polenta is straight-up corn meal while grits are made by drying white corn and
treating it with chemicals before
grinding.)
I love that this seemingly
innocuous ingredient – cornmeal – can provide such a soulful
foundation to an otherwise splashy and flamboyant menu. Surprising? Not so
when one considers its rich, deep and sinister
history.
One of the great dishes of
Italian cuisine grew out of necessity. Two thousand years ago Roman legions
conquered Europe by traveling with easy-to-cook grains such as spelt, millet,
and chick peas which were boiled into gruel called polenta. In the mid-17th
century with the introduction of corn as the main crop, coarsely ground corn
meal became synonymous with polenta, and was soon the primary staple of the
Northern Italian diet. Before long poor farming families subsisted almost
exclusively on polenta, as Pasquale Villari reported in his book,
Lettere
Meridionali. Though cheap and filling, simple
cornmeal did not provide adequate nutrition; the dependence on polenta brought
with it an appalling and wide-spread deficiency called pellagra, the description
of which is not for the faint of heart: “It begins with head and back
pains, numbness of the extremities, and stomach aches. The sight becomes foggy,
hearing declines, and then palsy begins, starting in the trunk and spreading to
the extremities and tongue. It frequently induces madness, which is also
intermittent, and takes many forms, in particular depression and
despondency...”
Up until World War
II, polenta remained a symbol of poverty, and was oft-referred to as “the
meat of the poor.” As the post-war economy improved, Italian immigrants to
America refused to serve it as it still carried a heavy stigma of poverty and
disease. Those who did not emigrate continued to rely heavily on corn meal.
Even now, Northern Italians are sometimes called
polentoni,
or polenta eaters.
It is a wonder that
polenta could ever overcome this dismal past. It’s all over the place
these days – making quite a show at highly regarded restaurants and popping
up in a huge variety of recipes. It has been theorized that younger generations
of Italians have reclaimed it as an important part of their national heritage.
This may indeed be a part of polenta’s renaissance, but it is hard to
overlook its three key charms: it is very tasty, extremely versatile, and
incredibly inexpensive. As long as I am not forced to eat polenta and only
polenta for weeks on end, I would quite happily choose to eat it –
especially with spicy shrimp and andouille sausage with green hot pepper sauce,
and particularly while watching Survivor and decorating a Christmas
tree.
Posted: Fri - December
12, 2003 at 03:17 PM