This is one of those little amusements:
10 delicious polenta recipes, from scallops to cherry blossom cake
Peasant Italian food is something that page after page is devoted to. Peasant American food is not. Because, you know, Italian peasant food is Tuscan sunlight and American peasant food is goddam it they’re white racists and Americans!
Polenta being cornmeal porridge, grits being cornmeal porridge but one’s Italian peasants and the other is American such.
The G has done grits but it was 6 years back. And think on it just for a moment, The Deal between Bliar and the One Eyed Viking. We’d all think very differently of it if it had been over a plate of grits now, wouldn’t we?
Is it semantics? Does ‘polenta’ sound exotic, while ‘grits’ sounds like something you spread on the road in winter?
Delicious and polenta do not belong together.
Jerzy Balowski : “I’m not really foreign, you know. I just do it to appear more sophisticated. I mean, nobody’d buy Evian water if it was called Blackburn water, would they? Nobody’d wear Kicker boots if they were made in Scunthorpe”!
Italian peasants were highly resistant to planting potatoes. (The landlords’ plot or something.) Even today Italian food barely features spuds apart from gnocchi.
Most Guardian readers would love to hang around Italian peasants. Unthinking Catholicism, pregnant women in kitchens and sporting black eyes, hard manual labour, dislike of immigrants, the Mafia.
Polenta was delicious long before it became de rigeur at every chattering class dinner party.
The French people I’ve met attitude to oats has been why are you eating them, are you a horse? They much prefer horse, cuts out the middle man. Mind you the Italians are partial to horse too.
It’s worse than that, Tim. Grits and polenta are two different things, the corn for grits being processed differently. The American (Southern) equivalent of polenta is called “cornmeal mush”.
Philip is correct. Grits and polenta taste different. Grits can be quite tasty, though I prefer salt on mine to the common southern tradition of sprinkling on sugar.
I can remember as a kid our family having dinner at one of my parents’ friends who’d been born in Yugoslavia. He chuckled as he served the polenta saying that this is what they had to eat as kids because they were poor but now in America he’s serving it as a treat.
Reminds me of a priceless comment from the rather pretentious chef/proprietor at my favourite restaurant in the late eighties and early nineties:
“I’m obsessed with French peasant food at the moment. Of course, you won’t find any peasants in here eating it. Not at my prices.”
Being fond of poached eggs on mashed potato I bought a packet of Idaho instant mash a while ago. It tasted OK but something was not quite right. I consulted the packet. The bastards had put sugar in it.
They should stick to blueberry pie.
The whole italian “peasant quisine” came to exist because they had bugger all, and had to make do, not unlike the chinese… “How to make something tasty with Buggerall” is a clear sign someone else is hogging the pork..
Of course.. This fits the Grauniad philosophy, since they want us all to be poor, and are passing off this stuff as “cuisine” to Prepare the Masses so that they’ll actually like it when it comes down to “This or Nothing”…
dearieme, the USians put gallons of unwanted subsidised high-fructose corn syrup in everything. They have to do something with it when they aren’t making grits out of it.
I tried the Idaho stuff as well, pleasantly surprised, the cheese or flavoured ones hide the sugar better, also their scalloped potatoes pack isn’t bad.
For something quick to whip up and only a couple of dollars it’s ok and handy to have in the cupboard
On the other hand, the Gaurdian does have 17 recipes involving Guinness up today.
So I’m not complaining.
It’s a universal constant that the peasant food from every country and continent has the same origin.
The peasants had to find a way of making the cheap leftovers and bugger all walking protein, tasty because the bloke on a horse with the sword had taken all the bacon.
See France Italy, Spaon, China and for all I know Aztec versions as well.
PS – Peasant food changes, at one point it was written in to contract that Highland estate labourers could not be given Salmon more than 5x a week and scottish coastal peasants ate Oysters ( free at source)