The pack says polenta but it’s corneal. It’s only polenta after you’ve cooked it. And cornmeal is maize, ground to various consistencies. Corn flour is the finest of these and was sold for decades in Australia under the ‘Kream’ brand, of which tons were sold every year to thicken the watery stews of Irish and Scottish immigrants.
Complication #1: Australian cornflour is corn starch rather than the entire grain, ground, as it is in the rest of the world. So that previous sentence is not strictly true.
Complication #2: some products labelled ‘corn flour’ are made from wheaten starch. The hell with it. Let’s get on with the story.
Polenta, the cooked product, is - as I think I might have mentioned somewhere - a good alternative to mashed potato. It has an affinity, a complemetariness (or possibly more correctly a supplementariness) with strongly flavoured dishes not quite equalled by the spud, even when dressed up for dinner, so to speak. Velvety, creamy polenta stands up, for example, to the complex flavours and textures of osso buco heavy with tomato and herbs and topped with gremolata. Personal preference, of course. You might prefer mashed parsnips or oat cakes or olive bread. Like mashed potato, polenta can be turbo-charged with sympathetic enhancements; grated pecorino or parmesan; chopped parsley leaves and stalks; finely chopped kalamata olives; butter and cracked pepper, finely chopped capers.
The other night I made a lie of the title on the pack of ‘polenta’. I mixed a cup of plain flour with a cup of the yellow ground maize in a large bowl, and added a tablespoon of sugar, two teaspoons of baking powder and half a teaspoon of salt into the mix.
In another bowl, I mixed half a cup of buttermilk with half a cup of canned creamed corn, a large egg, a quarter cup of melted and cooled butter, and a dash of tabasco.I folded the wet ingredients through the flour mixture until just moistened, and tipped the resulting batter into a well-greased oven-safe cast iron frying pan.
Twenty minutes and it was done. Cornbread. Made from polenta.
Nice out of the oven. Even better later, cooled, sliced, spread with lashings of butter, and then grilled to fuse the butter with the slightly sweet crust.
It’s a great sadness to me that the one daughter still living with us doesn’t like polenta, and I mean the proper stuff that takes 30 or so minutes to cook, if instant was all that was available, I’d understand her reluctance. Or the friends who could find no joy in a steamy, yellow, luscious puddle of carbs, mostly because they resolutely declined to add any flavourings at all, like butter and cheese, which probably interfered with their regular liver detox diet. Merda!
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