Recipe
Polenta pasticciata with sausage and tomato
Pasticciata comes from pasticcio, which in Italian means both a pie and a mess, and which English eventually borrowed as pastiche after running it through French and losing most of the fun.
An Italian who says che pasticcio means what a shambles, look at the state of this. An Italian who says pasticcio in a kitchen means something layered into a dish and baked. The word carries both senses at once and nobody finds this remotely confusing, which tells you how the dish is regarded: it is understood to be a lovely mess, assembled from parts, and precision is not the point of it.
Polenta pasticciata is what happens when yesterday's polenta sets solid in the fridge, which it will, always, no matter what anybody does about it. You slice the slab, layer it with sauce and cheese, and bake it. It is the northern Italian equivalent of a lasagne with the pasta swapped out, and it is arguably better, because polenta does not go slimy at the edges the way an over-baked lasagne sheet does.
This version is made from scratch rather than from leftovers, because waiting around for a leftover is a poor way to plan a dinner. Make the polenta, pour it onto an oiled tray, and let it set for an hour while you do something else entirely. Then it slices cleanly with a knife dipped in hot water.
Sausage and tomato underneath, fontina on top, thirty minutes in a hot oven.
It is the most robust object in this book. It is already solid. It cannot leak, it cannot go soggy, and it reheats into precisely itself, which is more than can be said for almost anything else you will carry to work.
- Prep 20 min
- Cook 45 min
- Serves 4
- Cost €
Method
- 1
Boil the water with a good teaspoon of salt, rain in the polenta while whisking, then stir with a wooden spoon until very thick. Pour onto an oiled tray in a 1.5 cm layer and leave to set.
10 min
- 2
Brown the sausage meat hard in 2 tbsp of the oil, then add the onion and cook until soft. Add the garlic and rosemary for a minute.
12 min
- 3
Pour in the wine, reduce it, then add the passata. Season and simmer until thick enough to sit on a spoon.
20 min
- 4
Cut the set polenta into slices or squares. A knife dipped in hot water goes through it cleanly.
5 min
- 5
Layer in an oiled dish: polenta, sauce, fontina, then polenta, sauce, fontina again. Finish with the parmigiano and the last of the oil.
6 min
- 6
Bake at 200°C fan until brown and bubbling at the edges. Rest 10 minutes before cutting.
30 min
Variations
Mushrooms browned hard, or a lentil ragù, in place of the sausage for a vegetarian version. Gorgonzola instead of fontina is the Lombard way and much more assertive. A layer of spinach squeezed very dry between the polenta and the sauce. If you have leftover polenta already set in the fridge, skip step 1 entirely and this becomes a 40 minute dish. Freezes cooked, in squares, for 2 months.