By
Hilary Prendini Toffoli
Photography & Styling
Christoph & Diane Heierli
THERE WAS A TIME when polenta was
something you couldn’t persuade anyone outside Northern Italy to eat. In
the south they regarded it as food for the poor and backward, and called
the northerners polentoni—lumpy
polenta-heads—because it was their staple diet.
Now it’s all changed.
Now you
find polenta on restaurant menus from Sandton to Sydney. The food that
kept the Roman legionnaires going—made in those days from various
primitive grains ground into paste and called pulmentum—has
become as internationally fashionable as bruschetta
and balsamic vinegar.
Now everyone is a polenta
show-off. Bloggers across the globe compare polenta cookery techniques and
swop recipes for things like Polenta Pumpkin Pie. Obscure Australian chefs
in Queensland kitchens boil their polenta in coconut milk, call the dish
something with the word fusion in the title, and reap endless praise.
Even renowned restaurateurs like
New York’s Mario Batali—rated 97th in Forbes 100 world celebrities
last year—keep coming up with their own decadent polenta offshoots.
Batali’s Hot Polenta Sandwich
for example consist of two slices of cold polenta glued together with a
paste of anchovies, capers and garlic, then dredged in flour and egg and
deep-fried into cholesterol-enhancing oblivion. A kind of rectangular
Italian samoosa without the spice—certainly not in line with Batali’s
famous quote: “The food at my restaurants is mostly the food of
Italy’s grandmothers.”
All the Italian grandmothers I
know have a traditional approach to cold polenta slices that’s far
healthier. They grill them on a cast-iron pan or on the coals, and then
top them with some strong-flavoured cheese like gorgonzola, Parmesan or
fontina.
Like this it’s manna from
heaven if you use the real thing—polenta
bramata not instant polenta. The nonnas
cook it fairly stiff, pour it hot from the pot on to a board or large
casserole dish and let it cool, overnight preferably. Then they cut it
into inch-thick wedges, brush the wedges with olive oil and seasoning, and
braai them.
The speed at which polenta has
taken off in the global stratosphere is astounding when you consider how
long the unpretentious grain has been hanging around without hitting the
headlines. Fossil maize pollen 80 000 years old has been found under a
road in Mexico, while proof that a wild form of the grain was being eaten
5 000 years BC has been dug up in a Mexican cave—two tiny cobs without
the corn, carbon dated at 7 000 years.
Naturally it was Columbus who
brought the mealie to Europe. It
thrived on Italy’s hot soggy northern plains, particularly in Lombardy.
Polenta took over from pasta as the national northern diet.
‘The
polenta in the north-eastern Veneto region is like South African mealiepap—less tasty than the golden polenta, which has seduced the world’
The polenta produced in the
north-eastern Veneto region is like South African mealiepap—finer,
whiter and less tasty than the golden polenta produced in Lombardy, which
has seduced the world.
“We used to produce an orange
polenta called
quarantina that
took 40 days from seeding to picking, sweeter than any polenta you’ve
ever tasted,” says Franco Zezia, the farm boy from Brescia in Lombardy
who started Magica Roma restaurant in Pinelands in Cape Town two decades
ago. He, with his partner Ezio Debaggi, still runs what has become one of
South Africa’s busiest traditional Italian restaurants.
“When I was growing up,
my
grandfather had a long stick that he changed every six months, made from a
special kind of wood, to stir the polenta. It’s always made in a deep
copper pot called a paiolo. When
Mussolini took the metal for the war, everyone buried their paiolos
in the garden.
“My family still farm maize and
we eat polenta with everything, especially dishes with lots of
sauce—rich stewy dishes like ossobuco,
fish with tomatoes, snails with tomato and garlic. We eat a lot of pork—cotechino
(sausage), zampone
(trotters) with lentils. That’s when you must have the polenta on the
table. It’s a sin to have pork without it.
“In big families the polenta
would be spread on a wooden board the size of the table. The sauce and the
pork ribs and sausage would be put in the middle, and that’s how you’d
eat it. The children would have to eat their way through the polenta to
get to the meat.”
Franco and Ezio always have
Polenta with Gorgonzola on Magica Roma’s menu. “The strong taste of
the cheese complements the polenta, says Franco. “It’s extremely
popular.” No wonder. Based on two elemental flavours, this is a basic
but sophisticated dish, the memory of which lingers tantalizingly on your
taste buds.
Another traditional Italian
restaurateur who always has polenta on the menu is Giorgio Nava, owner of
the much-acclaimed Cape Town city centre restaurant, 95 Keerom.
“Polenta is one of our side
dishes, made with rosemary and parmesan. South Africans don’t know
polenta but I always encourage them to try it as a change from mashed
potato and rice, and when they visit us again I often hear them
recommending it to their friends. We cook it fresh every day. The staff
loves it.
“At home in Milan a typical
dish is Polenta with Ragú, like a Bolognese sauce but finely minced, with
not so much tomato and not so liquid.”
‘Pity
this dish is not sophisticated enough to put on a menu—too close to pap en vleis frankly.’
All
Italian grandmothers grill polenta slices on a cast-iron pan, or on the
coals and then top them with some strong-flavoured cheese.
It’s the kind of different but
scrumptious comfort food you sometimes long for in upmarket South African
eating places. The emphasis tends to be on impressing you with the
chef’s whizzbang genius rather than cheering up your stomach.
Surprisingly, polenta is not on
the menu at Cape Town’s other Italian institution, Mario’s in Green
Point. Pina Marzagalli, the earth mother who has run the restaurant since
her husband Mario died, says most Capetonians eating out don’t want mealiepap. Not even when it’s Italy’s tasty golden variety.
“But people who know us
do ask
for polenta, and they ask what we’re serving it with today. It could be
Italian sausage with mushrooms and tomato, or trippa
milanese, or rabbit or wild duck when it’s available, marinated in
red wine.”
As a treat,
on a more traditional
stretch of turf than Polenta Pumpkin Pie, Pina makes for me a Polenta Cake
with almonds and lemon zest. It’s rather like a deliciously rich lemony
shortbread and it’s called Tortionata,
a speciality of her home town Lodi, where her father was a winemaker and
she and her three sisters and mother used to press the grapes with their
feet to make Barbera and Chiaretto wines.
She gives me a
Tortionata to take home, and says it will last at least ten days.
Not a chance. It vanishes almost immediately.
Good
Taste Magazine/Wine-of-the-Month Club