A very ancient and popular food of our Venetian region is “polenta”. It looks like a kind of porridge and it’s obtained from cornmeal cooked in salted boiling water.
Usually polenta is yellow, made from yellow cornmeal, but in some parts of our region (especially Venice, Padua and Treviso) it can be also white, obtained from a more uncommon and prestigious kind of white cornmeal. As I was born in Padua, I can still remember this delicious white polenta, which is on the contrary very rare to find here in Verona, where it’s always yellow.
But, what is polenta and how do we eat it?
First of all, this is an ancient peasant dish, a basic food in a poor kitchen, when people lived from the products of their land. Cornmeal fields were very common in our countryside and this explains the habit to make polenta.
Polenta is cooked in boiling water just with some salt (maybe once they didn’t even add any salt) and is served warm and can accompany meat, fish, mushrooms, salami, sausages… It’s like bread, it goes well with almost anything.
The versatility of polenta is given by the fact that you can eat it immediately after cooking, but also in the next days, when it becomes more solid and can be warmed up on the grill or in the pan. Believe me: with its crispy crust, grilled polenta is really delicious!
Traditionally polenta is cooked in a copper pot, but in a modern way we cook it in normal inox pans and it’s delicious anyway.
When it’s ready, it can be transferred in a flat dish or also on a wooden board, it depends also on its consistency. Personally I like when polenta is quite solid, not too liquid.
In my experience, when foreigners eat polenta, their first reaction is not very enthusiastic… But I’m sure they could learn appreciate and love it, if combined with the right food during a typical Venetian dinner!