Skip to main content
Main

Polenta

Polenta is a thick cornmeal porridge cooked in boiling water and finished with butter, pepper, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Polenta

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Bring 3¾ cups of water to a boil.

  2. Gradually add ¾ pound of semolina, maize, or corn-flour, stirring continuously.

  3. Cook until the mixture thickens to a very thick gruel consistency.

  4. Stir in a pat of butter and season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Semolina + peppertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together159 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Semolina + buttertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together321 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Semolina, maize, or corn-flour
Starch that thickens with hot water into the dense, creamy body of the polenta.
Butter
Adds fat for a smoother mouthfeel and a richer, rounder flavour.

The step that matters

Adding the meal gradually while stirring. Dumping the grain into boiling water lets lumps form as the outside gelatinises before the inside hydrates. Steady stirring keeps the mixture smooth and evenly thickened.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More polenta recipes

Pudding 7Bean 5Cheese Cakes 5 See all 25 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes