Polenta Is Just Fancy Porridge

You can call it polenta, but anytime I see a bowl of ground-up grain goo I think of only one word, rarely used in conversation: porridge. Porridge (aka gruel) is a mythical food that exists in fairy tales and storytime. It's for families of bears and orphans. It's hot slop, baby. It bubbles and burns; it's corn lava. It requires finesse, patience, and constant motion just to end up as a sad, steamy, tasteless mush. Polenta is a loveless labor with no real payoff, so why do chefs love it?

The history of polenta in Italy is a tragic story. The 19th century Northern Italians were poor farmers, and polenta was the cheapest way to achieve nourishment – only they weren't actually getting nourished. Italians ate so much damn polenta that they developed a new disease, pellagra, which is basically a B3 deficiency that occurs due to poor diet. What's even more bizarre is that as pellagra swept the area, Italy responded by banning corn. New trends can be scary and corn was hip. Kids started skipping school and eating polenta underneath the bleachers. Parents took it at parties and experienced a sexual awakening. Everybody was high and Italy was thriving. While Northern Italians were dying due to a severe lack of niacin, Italians of the South started calling them polentoni – a word that literally translates to "big polentas." Today, we honor 19th century Italy by poisoning ourselves with high fructose corn syrup – and it's the rest of the world calling us polentoni.

Middle-class Italians started to get crafty. They started to put meat sauce and bechamel on polenta. They served it on a big wooden board with mushroom ragu. No longer was it the gruel eaten by these clueless, bumpkin Northern Italians. The polentoni found a way. Like all great civilizations, they figured out how to polish a turd. Skip ahead to the modern American dining scene, where polenta is available in one form or another at restaurants across the nation. Here's this dish rooted in negative connotation, poverty, and disease. It's got a long rap sheet and barely tastes like anything. Why the fuck, then, do restaurants serve it? Well, we made it accessible to the brunch crowds. You can order it with a fried egg, pancetta, and heirloom tomatoes. It's served with spicy shrimp and sausage arrabiata. It's versatile and it's everywhere. But, who's ordering it? Is it you?

I don't think I've ever been with somebody who ordered polenta for brunch. I've cooked in a dozen kitchens, have traveled the country, and have had numerous, long, unnecessary conversations/arguments about food with chefs and comedians. Through it all, I can't remember polenta ever coming up as a thing that someone craves.

Maybe our subconscious sees it as porridge. Hot bowls of mushy grain aren't considered lavish or bougie, and that's what we want to eat, and more importantly, be seen eating. Because we aren't orphans, dammit. We aren't starving farmers living in log cabins, and we are certainly more domesticated than bears. I don't go to work every day at the Facebook factory to come home and eat porridge. I'm not a damn polentoni.

Polenta is a historically and contextually impoverished dish for people in the know; the kind of thing chefs love to thrust into the spotlight. Plenty of peasant foods have risen from the ashes to achieve mass appeal – tacos, oysters, sweetbreads, pasta – and they've all been elevated and widely accepted. Not this one. It's got an uphill battle against poverty, disease, and tragic storytelling. That's why I love it. It's always going to have a dark history. There's no saving polenta. It'll never blow your mind, but everybody should try a little porridge. Everybody should learn how to polish a turd.