7 hours ago
5
This, then, was the situation: it was Friday night after a long week, and having met a friend on the way home for a glass of wine, which arrived with crisps, taralli, dry roasted peanuts and enough salt that we needed another glass, it seemed a good idea to go home and cook polenta – the long-stir sort as opposed to the instant variety, although I always have that in the cupboard, too. Another good idea, which came to me as I pulled a new packet from the back of the dresser and ignored the flutter of tiny wings, was to make more than enough polenta and pour the extra into a Pyrex dish while it was still hot, so it could set into a block to be cut into slices and grilled the next day.
I’ve written about polenta before; how the word is ancient and generic – referring to any mushy dish made from cereal flour and water – and how, after its arrival in Europe in the 1600s, it became synonymous with ground maize. There exists a world of different grades and milling, but, broadly speaking, when you buy ground maize (cornmeal) for polenta, you will have two options: finely ground (which might also be white) for a soft, thin polenta, and coarsely ground, which will have glassy-looking grains and makes an excellent body scrub and a harder, tastier polenta. The latter also takes much longer to cook, anything from 40 minutes to several hours, depending on who (or which packet) you consult, although in my experience an hour is almost always enough, and anything beyond that is more a way of deepening the flavour. Stirring is also a matter of opinion, with some saying it must be constant, while others (hello, Anna Del Conte!) noting that after 10 minutes, if the heat is low enough, you can in fact leave the pan to attend to other things, coming back every now and then to give it a strong, hard stir.
So, having stirred my polenta intermittently until it looked like a supermoon crossed with a boiling mud pool, I added butter and served most of it with fried mushrooms and slices of melty taleggio. We also had another glass of wine and I forgot the earlier good idea, meaning that several hours later I didn’t come back to a neatly set block of polenta, but a pan with a deep yellow crust. Not being the first time, I do have a solution for this oversight: ignore the pan until the morning, then lever out the bits and fry them with eggs. Another option also involves waiting until the morning and then, using your hands, digging and gouging out the yellow remnants, weighing them, and squashing them with more butter, dried fruit and nuts.
Be warned: these patties remain delicate until they cool, so leave them on the tray until they are sturdy enough to move on to a rack. They are best described as a biscuit crossed with a flapjack crossed with a bread pudding, and it is a good idea to have them with a hot drink. The correct idea would be coffee with a shot of grappa.
Leftover polenta biscuits
Makes About 15
400g leftover cold polenta
100g room temperature butter, diced
180g soft brown sugar
100g raisins
100g prunes, dried fig or apricots, snipped into bits
100g chopped nuts
1 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp cinnamon
Optional handful dry polenta or plain flour
Hands are best for this. Working in a bowl, break the polenta into bits, then add the butter and squeeze it into the polenta – it will look lumpy, but don’t worry. Add the remaining ingredients apart from the dry polenta or flour, and squeeze again. The mixture will be quite soft, but not so much that it can’t be shaped; if it is very sloppy, add a little dry polenta or flour.
Line an oven tray with baking paper. Break off small, plum-sized lumps of the mixture (making about 15 in all) and form them first into balls and then into small patties about 5cm across x 5mm thick. Arrange the biscuits on the tray, and press the tops flat with the back of a fork.
Bake at 150C (130C fan)/300F/gas 2 for 45 minutes, or until slightly golden. The biscuits will remain soft and delicate until they cool, so leave them on the tray until they are cool enough to move on to a rack.
