/ 7 November 1997

Corn utopia

Rowley Leigh : Moveable feast

Although I first ate and enjoyed polenta at a dinner party many years ago, I never got around to cooking it myself until the current vogue first started in the early Nineties. But the stuff I came up with in the kitchen was hardly the stuff of dreams, and came nowhere near conjuring up a “harvest moon in a large circle of mist”, as an Italian poet once put it.

I’d used “instant” polenta, which cooks in five minutes to a smooth, bland mush. We looked bleakly at it then tasted it gingerly and failed to find much taste of anything.

There are two things to know about polenta: first, it has to be the right stuff – “instant” polenta is the Smash of the maize universe. Polenta is not a fine yellow powder, but a variety of coarsely milled maizes, flecked white, orange and yellow. Those who complain they “don’t like polenta” are unlikely to have had the real thing.

Polenta hardly comes under the category of convenience food, either. It takes the best part of an hour to cook, and though it doesn’t need to be stirred the whole time it still needs a strong arm, preferably one wrapped in a cloth for protection as it bubbles and spits. And the pot is a swine to clean afterwards.

The second point about even good polenta is that it needs help. It needs butter (or olive oil, or cream), salt and other seasonings, and cheese to moisten and enrich it. Polenta glories in cheese, but given plenty of strong, rich sauce, the polenta should be made to taste quite bland as a marvellous sop to the ensemble.

To cook polenta:

175g polenta flour

1 litre water

Salt and pepper

Bring the well-salted water to the boil. Armed with a strong metal whisk, slowly pour in the polenta, stirring constantly as you do so.

When all the polenta is added, continue to stir until the mixture starts to bubble and erupt. Turn the heat down very low, switch utensils to a heavy wooden spoon, and scrape the polenta off the sides of the pan.

Cook very gently for about 40 minutes, stirring occasionally.

The polenta is cooked when it becomes very thick and starts to come away as a mass from the sides of the pan as you stir. Now you’re ready to add flavourings or to pour it out of the pan into a tray for frying or grilling.

Polenta with three cheeses

Basic polenta recipe plus:

150g mascarpone

150g Gorgonzola

75g Parmesan

100g unsalted butter

Crumble the Gorgonzola, grate the Parmesan and melt the butter.

Stir the mascarpone and Gorgonzola into the cooked polenta, and dish it out on to warmed plates.

Pour a little melted butter over each serving and sprinkle lavishly with the Parmesan.