Italian cuisine has been characterized by being the food of the peasant; just as poor Southern Italians worked the fields with their bellies full of pasta, Northern Italians existed on little more than polenta for centuries.
Polenta has been dubbed by some "Italian grits" and there are similarities to the hominy grits that are so popular in the Southern United States. In this way polenta, grits and other "mush" type foods share a common link as the food of poverty.
In ancient times, what would later be called polenta started out as one of the earliest and simplest foods made from grain. Made from wild grains and later from primitive wheat, farro (a popular Italian grain), millet, spelt or chickpeas, the grain was mixed with water to form a paste that was then cooked on a hot stone. In this way, early polenta may have pre-dated leavened bread, since yeasts were often hard to come by and milling techniques were not yet refined.
History of Polenta
In Roman times, polenta (or as they knew it, pulmentum) was the staple of the mighty Roman Legions and they would eat it in either a porridge or in a hard cake like form, much like today. Even though bread was widely available in Ancient Rome, the legions and the poor alike preferred the simplicity and taste of their early polenta, next was the introduction of buckwheat into Italy by the Saracens. This nutritive grain - known as grano saraceno is still popular in Tuscany for making polenta and adds a distinctive flavor that was widely favored for centuries. Buckwheat polenta would eventually fall out of favor when a crop from the New World arrived in Italy sometime in the 15th or 16th centuries known as maize. The new crop was a perfect match for the farms of Northern Italy, where landowners could grow vast fields of corn for profit, while forcing the peasantry to subsist on cornmeal. Amazingly, this simple act of greed on the part of landowners helped shape a major component of Italian cooking. From then on most of Italy's polenta consumption was made from corn, which ranges in color from golden yellow to the Veneto's white polenta.
