Spezzatino di pollo with peas and polenta

Italy runs on regional insults, and two of the best ones are about food. Northerners call southerners terroni, roughly earth-people. Southerners call northerners polentoni, polenta-eaters, which is meant to suggest slow, heavy and a bit dim, on the theory that nobody eating that much boiled maize can be expected to move quickly.

Here is the thing the southerners are quietly wrong about. Polenta is superb. It is also, for anyone who eats lunch at a desk, very close to a miracle: it costs almost nothing, it keeps for days, and it is one of the only starches on earth that comes back out of a microwave in the same condition it went in. Pasta goes soft. Rice goes hard and dry at the edges. Polenta simply does not care. Set it in the fridge overnight and it firms into a slab you can slice, which is not a defect, it is a second recipe.

A spezzatino is any stew of small pieces of meat, from spezzare, to break into pieces. The version here uses chicken thigh, which has enough fat and connective tissue to survive forty minutes of simmering and comes out better for the experience, plus a handful of peas near the end for colour and a bit of sweetness against the wine. In Lombardy or the Veneto this would more likely be beef or veal, cooked for two hours, and it would be magnificent, and nobody with a job on Monday morning is doing that on a Sunday night.

Buy the instant polenta. Traditional polenta wants forty-five minutes of continuous stirring with a wooden stick and the forearm of a farmhand, which is precisely why it was historically a communal activity with several people taking shifts. Instant takes five minutes, gets you about ninety percent of the way, and leaves you sitting down with a glass of something red while the stew finishes. That is worth the missing ten percent.