What Sort of Food Is Polenta?

Polenta can be served for breakfast, lunch or dinner. It can be the main course or dessert. It has a rich tradition yet can be served in the most modern restaurants. It is to Italy what the potato is to Ireland. Served hot or cold, soft or hard, it is as versatile as the occasion demands.

Identification

Polenta is boiled yellow cornmeal. You cannot get much more basic than that yet it is a traditional Italian dish that has been enjoyed for centuries. Some confuse it with the southern dish called grits, but that is white corn that is dried and chemically treated with lye to form a very different product.

History

Italy made polenta popular soon after it introduced corn as a crop in the 1700s. It was considered peasant food because it was a staple of their diet when times where lean, especially in the winter months when everything else had been eaten. The corn was simply dried and then ground into course grit and boiled. In some areas, the people ate polenta so exclusively that a nutritional deficiency developed called pellagra from the boiled corn's lack of niacin and the protein tryptophan.

Types

The variations are endless but examples are simple polenta with melted butter to cheesy polenta to a layered polenta with meat and cheese like a lasagna dish. Any city in which a good Italian population resides will have a supply of pre-made polenta in its grocery markets. Although it is not quite as fresh in taste and texture as the homemade type, it is great for frying for breakfast. Polenta is served as the starch alongside any roasted meat or vegetables in many Italian homes, almost more often than pasta.

Features

The method of making polenta is simply boiling salted water and slowly stirring in cornmeal and then stirring it until it thickens. Alternatively, some people add the cornmeal to cold salted water, bring it to a boil and then shut it off and let it sit in a covered pot for about 40 minutes. The end result is a thick mush that can be refrigerated and then sliced or simply served hot as an accompaniment to a dinner.

Benefits

The benefits of polenta or cornmeal mush were that it was plentiful and easy to prepare. It was inexpensive to grow corn and whatever corn was not picked fresh could be easily stored for the winter to be ground into meal. As a simple but versatile food, it could be eaten at any of the three meals during the day. It could be cooked in the morning and would still be good in the evening. Leftovers could be fried into cakes and served with sugar and taken on the road as a lunch. It was the simplest food available then and still might be if it weren't for modern-day supermarkets and fast food outlets.

Resources

• Pellagra Article