Polenta, Angelo e Demone

Already know about polenta's history?
Making Polenta | Polenta Recipes and recipes well suited to polenta

Returning to Background:

Most people think of pasta as the quintessential Italian Dish, and this is true for much of the Peninsula, especially the south. Polenta, on the other hand, was the staple food of the poor in the North, especially those living out in the country. Prior to the introduction of corn in the late 1700s it consisted of grains and/or legumes mashed and cooked to a mush, and seasoned with oil, onion, fennel, honey, or whatever was available. Uninspiring, but certainly nutritious enough to keep people alive.

With the introduction of corn things changed radically, as the land owners discovered that the new grain was more productive than the traditional grains, and they could therefore devote more of their land to crops that would bring them income if they had their tenant farmers subsist on corn. The corn was milled like the traditional grains had always been, and polenta came to mean corn meal mush. Before long poor families subsisted on nothing else, as Pasquale Villari reported in his book, Lettere Meridionali, in 1886:

"...The farmers known as disobbligati (day laborers) support more than 20,000 families around Mantova, and there are many others who aren’t much better off. These laborers earn a wage of about 1.2 Lire per day, when they work, and their hardships last 10, 12, and even 14 hours daily; the commission (investigating the lot of the workers) justly termed their conditions homicidal. The farmers and their families survive almost exclusively on polenta, to which they add onions and bad cheese in the evening, but not always. When they’re working they also eat bread and soup once a week, but during the winter it’s polenta morning noon and night, and the three meals are frequently compressed into one. What’s more, the polenta is frequently made from corn that has spoiled for lack of drying kilns, and has either fermented or sprouted. This state of affairs worsens day by day, and has already begun to touch the more wealthy farmers, to the point that they have begun to sell their pigs, and the portion of grain assured them by their leases, to buy corn to stay their hunger throughout the winter.

Alas, simply grinding corn to make cornmeal produces a food that's filling but not nutritious, as the Human digestive system is unable to get at the nutrients (the Amerindians who lived on corn processed it differently). The exclusive dependance on cornmeal polenta brought with it an appalling nutritional deficiency called pellagra, which (quoting Villari again) "begins with head and back pains, numbness of the extremities, and stomach aches. The sight becomes foggy, hearing declines, and then palsy sets in, starting in the trunk and spreading to the extremities and tongue. It’s generally a progressive disease, but can become acute, almost like typhus, and kill quickly. However, it usually takes several months, with flare-ups that exhaust the victim and can kill him in a variety of ways that mimic other diseases. It frequently induces madness, which is also intermittent, and takes many forms, in particular depression and despondency..."

Why, you wonder, would anyone want to eat a food that brings all this on?

The answer then was that there was nothing else, and those who were unable to emigrate had no choice. North Italians still eat it today, on the other hand, because it is very tasty, extremely versatile, and an ideal accompaniment to all sorts of things. Though it can be bought ready-made, purists are correct in saying that what you make at home is better.

Making Polenta | Polenta Recipes and recipes well suited to polenta