by Bill Buford
For my part, I didn’t care if that restaurant bowl of polenta was American or Italian or Icelandic. Whatever it was, I ate it and was transported. And like so many of those first polenta eaters, my world changed from an overcast sky to a sunny bright yellow one. No wonder those Italians went crazy. I’d go crazy. Actually, I did go a little crazy, and while I failed to track down that miller in Piemonte, I did manage to find some sole-proprietor, do-it-by-hand operation and ordered a twenty-pound quantity from a wholesaler. A parcel arrived, and I went to work, following the instructions—a cup of polenta to four cups of water, some salt, lots of stirring, in fact forty minutes of stirring, and basta: your polenta is ready. Except it wasn’t, or I didn’t think so, and, if it was, it was nothing like what I’d eaten. Also, after forty minutes of stirring, I was worn out and hadn’t prepared the rest of my dinner, afraid that if I neglected the polenta it would stick to the bottom of the pot and be ruined. I had nineteen pounds twelve ounces left.
Maybe I could make corn bread, and the idea provoked an epiphany of resounding banality: corn bread is made from the same stuff as polenta. (Cornmeal: polenta. Cornmeal: corn bread. Why had this not occurred to me before?) The effect was miraculous: polenta was demystified. I get it! It’s white-trash food! A southerner’s devotion to cornmeal, I should explain, comes close to rivaling a northern Italian’s (the American South is one of the only other places with a large-scale outbreak of pellagra, with this crucial difference: it occurred in the twentieth century, when people knew what caused the disease and still ate too much corn). I was born in Louisiana and grew up on this stuff. In a sentimental moment, I, too, can invoke a memory essential to my identity—of my grandmother, say, hunched over her blackened cast-iron skillet, the salty smells of hot pork fat and the sugary ones of grainy corn caramelizing in it, and a string of vaguely sultry, swampy associations to prove that corn bread is at the heart of the southern soul. Polenta, I finally understood, was corn bread without the baking powder. Even so, I wasn’t getting it right. How difficult could it be?
Difficult enough that Batali wasn’t telling home cooks to make it. On his show, he recommends the instant kind, even though he never serves it in the restaurant. (Why eat plastic if you don’t have to?) In fact, from what I was reading, no one was telling people how to make it. The instruction on that twenty-pound bag I’d bought, for instance: a lie. I consulted other cookbooks: more lies. Their recipes were useless and misleading. It’s not so much water and so much polenta and so much time, but water and polenta and time, in whatever quantities it takes, until the dish is ready, which is never forty minutes but as long as three hours.
I discovered this on a late January afternoon in the Babbo kitchen—nearly a year to the day of my first anniversary of working there—and the fact that I made the discovery then, after so long and during the hustle and bustle of getting ready for the evening service, was instructive. The kitchen, finally, was becoming comprehensible. What had originally been a blur of other people’s busyness was now so many specific tasks, each with a beginning, an end, and a purpose related to what would appear on people’s plates. It seems obvious. Then again, so was the discovery itself, which consisted of nothing more than my realizing that polenta, for most of its cooking, is left untended. That’s it: a copper pot abandoned over a low fire. I peered inside: the polenta was bubbling away slowly, percolating more than simmering, making thick bubblegum bubbles.
I understood the implications immediately. “So you don’t have to stir it all the time?” I said aloud to nobody. I was very excited. If you don’t have to stir it all the time, then you can leave it alone. If you don’t have to stir it all the time, you can make other things. If you don’t have to stir it all the time, you can cook it for hours—what does it matter, as long as you’re nearby?
“Wow! I finally get it!” I turned to the sauté guy, Todd Koenigsberg. Making the polenta was the duty of the sauté guy, and since Dom had quit the station had been run by Todd, a man-child with dark curly hair, a dark curly beard, and flower-child looks. “Todd!” I exclaimed. “The polenta. Is it really the case you don’t have to stir it all the time?”
Todd seemed confused by my animation. (Even now I can see the workings of his mind, visible in the baffled look on his tiny face, trying to answer not the question I put to him but the one he seemed to be asking himself, namely: What is wrong with this man?)
“Of course not,” he said, finally, his tone conveying that although I might be happy being a kitchen imbecile, everyone else had to make a living.
Todd, it seems, did not suffer from an acute polenta affliction and was obviously in no position to share my enthusiasm. For him, polenta was a burden. To make it, you needed first to whip it vigorously with a whisk, as I had always done, but then, once it got going, it was largely left alone with the whisk in the pot, so when people walked by they could give it a stir, something that I, in my kitchen obliviousness, had never noticed. The burden was in the fact that the polenta was never made first thing. It was always the seventh or eighth thing. So if you got busy and forgot—if suddenly, at four-thirty, you found yourself saying, “Oh, shit, the polenta!”—you were in trouble. You can’t crush three hours of slow cooking into sixty minutes. For emergencies, a box of the instant was hidden on the top shelf of the walk-in, but to use it was considered a failure of character. It also rendered Frankie apoplectic, who took these lapses as personal slights. “You’re doing this to humiliate me,” he’d say to whoever he’d just spotted, tiptoeing like a shoplifter, clandestinely slinking off with a box of the instant an hour before the service started. “You’re doing this to make me look bad. You’re doing this because you know we will fucking lose our fucking three stars if we start serving fucking instant, and if we lose our fucking three stars I lose my fucking job.” Frankie took over the polenta, and there was cornmeal everywhere, and the best tactic was to be very quiet and, if possible, also invisible, because the atmosphere was going to be very bad for the rest of the night.
And then I had a chance to make the polenta myself—not the twenty servings you get from that copper pot, but two hundred.
THE OCCASION was a benefit dinner in Nashville, Tennessee, and one that, in the words of one guest, brought together the “local wine geeks and the country music geeks for an evening of uninhibited extravagance,” drinking some of the world’s most costly beverages and eating food prepared by a famous chef flown in for the purpose along with his accomplished kitchen crew, which, this year, included Andy, Elisa, Frankie—and me.
I’d never been in a kitchen where meals for hundreds of people were routine. The service area was very large, but the actual cooking space was small and consisted of only four devices—a neglected flattop (flames were leaping through a crack), an oven, and two giant contraptions: one looked like a steel coffin and the other like a cement mixer. Frankie, who had once worked in a hotel, told me that the coffin was a “tilted skillet” and capable of boiling tremendous quantities of water in seconds. It would cook the pasta. The cement mixer, he said, was a “kettle.” He rubbed his hands across it. “We’ll cook the polenta in this,” he said quietly. The sight of both machines excited him—boy things with big engines.
I looked around. The rest of the space was taken up by long steel tables, more like a factory mailing room than a kitchen. The challenge of producing a meal for so many, I was starting to understand, was not in making the food (pasta for two hundred is pretty tricky but, theoretically, not that different from making it for two—you just need a bigger pot) but in putting it on plates. The plating was such an event that the organizers had put out a call for volunteers, and by midday there were thirty-two of them. They were all highly accomplished chefs, who (it was perfectly obvious) hadn’t come to do the plating, although they were happily prepared to help out. A famous chef was in town, and they wanted to get in on some of the cooking.
To everyone’s disappointment, most of it was already done. Short ribs were the entrée, and Elisa h
ad been making them for a week. The famous chef didn’t even need to be there. He appeared once, fleetingly, in and out, to drop off three crates of distressed-looking watercress and instructed the volunteers nearest him to pluck the leaves off the wispy stems. The leaf pluckers morosely gathered round a table. The task would take four hours, but at least they had something to do. At some point, two volunteers were dispatched to slice up some coppa—this would be the salumi antipasto—and they were delighted: that would take two hours. But there were still twenty-six volunteers. Andy, recognizing their distress, asked one of them, Margo, to slice up some horseradish (to be mixed with the watercress and mounted atop the short ribs), but she was uncomfortable with the slicer, a handheld guillotine called a mandolino, and awkwardly removed a quantity of her knuckles, blood everywhere, and now was in urgent need of bandaging, which involved eight Nashville volunteers (who, despite her distress, couldn’t disguise their relief at having a duty).
In fact, the polenta was the only thing that needed cooking.
POLENTA, COOKED slowly for three hours, expands to about six times its original volume, so if you’re making some for eight people, served with short ribs, perhaps (or any other darkly sauced entrée or juicy bird, polenta enjoying the same relationship to meat that linguine has to shellfish—yet another starchy vehicle to carry the flavors of something else), you want to start with about a cup. If you’re making it for two hundred, start with ten pints. The amount of water doesn’t matter, because you’re going to add more than is worth measuring: you just want to make sure the water is hot so the cooking is steady. On this occasion, Frankie poured in enough to fill about a quarter of the kettle device, added the polenta, and I started stirring. The result looked like pumpkin soup, very runny, but within minutes it soaked up all the liquid and changed from being obviously too dilute to looking almost ready, as though you could eat it (not recommended, unless your idea of dinner is a mouthful of sandbox). I added more water; the grains soaked it up. I added more; they soaked it up, until slowly the polenta behaved as though it had quenched its thirst. I stirred, and it remained pretty wet. I stirred: still wet. It had reached an equilibrium of sorts, where the water content in the grains was close to the liquid it was cooking in: a condition of hot mush. At this stage, most polenta makers, in the cereal’s long history, invoke a volcano crater. Personally, I’ve never seen a volcano crater, but it couldn’t be too different from what I found myself looking into at the bottom of this hot, steamy basin: thick, heavy bubbles, like golf balls, until they burst and became thick, heavy bits of flying polenta splattering up my arm. So that’s what lava feels like, I thought and then realized that the polenta was talking to me.
It asked: You wouldn’t knowingly stick your hand in an active volcano, would you?
Of course not, I answered.
Go away, then, it said. Do something else. I am not temperamental like risotto. Go on: cook the rest of the dinner.
THE DAY WE LEFT for Nashville, Mario had told me to pack a jacket that I’d find in the coat-check closet. It was a grand article: double-breasted, with fabric buttons and square shoulders and the restaurant’s logo sewn onto the chest. Frankie showed me his, which had his name on it, just under the logo, written out in a flourishing script. Mario had given it to him when he was promoted to sous-chef, and that’s what the jacket told people who knew about these things: that “Frank Langello” was a chef.
Cooks and chefs aren’t the same. By now I was a cook—I worked on the line—and answered to a chef. A chef was a boss. A cook’s name never appeared on a jacket. During the kitchen’s more demeaning moments, cooks lost their names entirely. “Hey, chickpea guy,” Frankie had taken to calling Alex, not only when his chickpeas were done badly—for a while, Alex couldn’t get his chickpeas right—but all the time, the implication being that Alex was such a contemptible person that his purpose in the kitchen amounted to nothing more elevated than making bad chickpeas. “Hey, white shirt guy!” Andy shouted once, in a fury, having caught a glimpse of a runner dawdling outside the swinging doors, in the space between the kitchen and the restaurant. (It was also where the restrooms were located, and the white shirt was worn not by a runner, alas, but by a customer.) Mario was addressed by rank. “Yes, Chef. Whatever you say, Chef. Right away, Chef.” The construction works if you replace “Chef” with “General.”
The Nashville volunteers had also dressed up. The head chef of Bound’ry—a small man with a goatee and rimless spectacles—presented himself as the sartorial equivalent of his menu (an East-West fusion thing) in a collarless black jacket and a black cap, very Chairman Mao. Margo, the one who had the knife fight with the mandolino, ran a first-name casual place called Margo. She was accompanied by her sous-chef, and they were both studiously folksinger friendly, with blue bandannas and matching baggy blue trousers. Nashville’s kosher chef wore a baseball cap, a sweatshirt, and a Brooklyn accent. One man was wearing a giant toque, the hat associated with French kitchens. He stood perfectly erect, his arm crooked with a crisp white towel draped from it, in pin-striped trousers and a jacket made with a whiter-than-white fine cotton. The others seemed to be avoiding him, although it’s possible he would have had no part of them anyway. He was very serious.
MY POLENTA, meanwhile, had changed: it was different to the touch (sticky) and to look at (almost shiny). Starch, which is the principal component of all grains, breaks down at high temperatures—for corn, between a hundred fifty and two hundred degrees—when the granules are then able to bond with water. This was why the water I’d added at the outset needed to be hot: to prevent the temperature from dropping and postponing this stage—the break-it-down-and-bond-it-back stage. The process is called “gelatinizing,” when the cereal granules swell and become more wetly viscous. When I’d begun, I’d been stirring the polenta with a whisk with a long handle. But as granules bonded with the water, the polenta expanded and, creeping up the length of the whisk, was encroaching on the handle.
I added a splash more water—not much (after all, the polenta and water, in their happy new molecular relationship, were getting along just fine)—and resumed my stirring. The polenta crept up a little more.
When would it stop? I wondered.
Then a question occurred to me: Would it stop? Silly notion. Of course it would stop. But knowing when could be useful.
Another splash of water, some more stirring. It crept up further.
This was modestly alarming—not five-bell alarming, but a concern: to stir the polenta, I was beginning to feel I had to be in the polenta. Would I finish cooking it before I was enveloped by it and became the darkly sauced meaty thing it was served with? The sensible thing would be to remove the whisk and go for a walk. The polenta had already told me I didn’t need to hang around. But with so much kitchen competition I was afraid to abandon my whisk, convinced that a thrusting Nashville volunteer would seize it and take over my task. That chef with the hat, for instance. He was now standing inches behind me. I’d been monitoring him in my peripheral vision. He had liberated himself from the others and crossed an invisible line that separated the Nashville volunteers from the cooking area. He’d done this one step at a time and after each step, seeing he hadn’t been rebuked, he’d taken one more.
“Sooooo,” he said.
I pretended not to hear.
“Sooooo,” he repeated.
I knew what he wanted: my whisk. I was sure of it. I concentrated on my stirring.
He sighed. “Sooooo,” he said again and added for emphasis: “Po-len-ta!” It was an alarmingly Italian pronunciation. I’d never heard the word said with such a forceful accent. I glanced at him sideways and noticed an Italian flag sewn into the neck of his pressed white jacket. This surprised me. I had thought that, dressed thus, he must be French. I looked again and saw on his jacket: Alfresco Pasta.
“Po-LEN-ta!” he said again, stretching out the middle syllable and flapping the roof of his mouth with his “t.”
Yes, I agreed. Pol
enta.
“Permit me to introduce myself. I call myself Riccardo.”