Pot for Polenta

Copper polenta pot and stirrer.

Once ‘cucina povera’ - a staple that kept peasant farmers in northern Italy alive through the long winters, polenta now makes its appearance on the menus of the most expensive restaurants in the world.

I remember hearing my Nonna grumble at my mother when she was making polenta. “Why can’t we eat something better? Are we poor?”

She’d HAD to eat polenta. She told me the stories. Every day cooking polenta, on the wood stove, just corn meal and water, in a copper pot, stirred with a big stick for at least an hour. Sometimes all they had to go with the polenta was one small dried fish that would be divided up into little pieces. She described how she’d touch the fish to each forkful of polenta to give it some flavour and how it was really bad when you were unlucky enough to only get the tail. I can understand her lack of enthusiasm for the mound of yellow my mother was preparing to put on the table.

In contrast to my Nonna, it’s a treat for me, as I don’t often take the time to make it for myself. I jump at the chance to have polenta on cold winter evenings.

My memories of polenta are all good. I think of meals with my whole family around the table and of my Nonna making rabbit stew to accompany it. I think of Pia, my sweet neighbour and long-time family friend in Italy, who sometimes makes it for me. She taught me how to properly whisk the polenta into the boiling water so it doesn’t get all clumpy and not to fuss about it getting stuck to the bottom of the pot because if you just fill it with water and set it on the balcony so it’s easy to clean the next day. She serves it to me with her porcini mushroom sauce, cooked on the woodstove that, in polenta eating season, is always lit her kitchen. Sometimes instead of sauce, there’s Gorgonzola or the local Montebore cheese. I smile thinking of the times I’ve gone to her house for dinner two days in a row and I get the leftover polenta fried or baked in the oven like a gratin.

It’s those happy, warm memories that inspired me to include this humble Piemontese dish in Out of Time.