Pure Polenta

Roasted polenta and spinach fritatta

A hot June day in my uncle’s house in Friuli. We had spent the morning at the marcato – the Saturday outdoor street market – in San Giorgio Di Nogaro, and, in a move that made it clear I was by no means a local, I had been out hanging laundry in the blazing mid-day heat while the kids napped. Kelly and I decided to take the family for a drive and as we piled into the Fiat (which blessedly decided to work that day) our little 5-year-old boy Jack suddenly had a major milestone toward manhood – his first moment of sarcasm. “Oh good,” he said dryly, “maybe we’ll see a corn field.”

And so it is in Friuli, beautiful mountains, gorgeous seaside to be sure, and a central region with fields of corn stretching out before you, punctuated with a towering campagnile (bell tower)or church steeple piercing the clear sky.

It is no wonder that this region, perhaps more than any other in Italy, embraces polenta as a mainstay of their cuisine.

My father is a polenta purest and makes it simply with ground cornmeal, water and salt. We eat it fresh and creamy with a nice stew, then cool the rest in a baking pan, cut it into rectangles and grill it the next day. A favourite summer lunch is simply grilled polenta, cheese and a salad of radicchio or arugula.

The recipe for this polenta is simple. A cup of fine corn meal, 4 cups of water, about ½ a tablespoon of salt and a well-watched, constantly stirred pot on medium heat for about 30 minutes.

Back Home

16 Finch Street, circa. 1971. Paul, Elisa & Mom, Cindy.

Growing up, 'back home' always meant Friuli, the beautiful province in Northern Italy my father comes from. Even my mother, a Canadian girl from Saskatchewan with French/Scotch/Irish heritage, came to think of Friuli as 'back home". We spent every second summer there, and my mother made it her mission to learn the culture, the unique Friulano language and – in a soulful, natural, as-though-I’ve-been-doing-this-all-my-life sort of way – the cooking from my Nonna, Adriana.

Back home in Northern BC, she recreated not just the delicious dishes, but also the warm ambiance inside the walls of our little yellow house on Finch Street. No matter how high the snow bank outside, inside my parents filled our home with good friends, good food, hilarious arguments and endless funny stories. It was Little Friuli – a million miles away.

Now, when I talk about ‘back home’, that is where my mind is, not in the original Friuli of my father, but in the Little Friuli my mother and father created on the Pacific Coast. It was true fusion long before California chefs had ever adopted the term – Italian foods with Pacific Northwest ingredients; an adopted extended family of people who had all landed there from different parts of the world; and a warm and gracious way of living in a beautiful, rugged northern rainforest.