Product Description

Originally a peasant dish, polenta is now showing up on the best restaurant menus in the country--and plenty of home cooks are following this lead. Easy to prepare and marvelously versatile, this golden grain can be enjoyed plain and simple or embellished with a wide range of tasty fillings, spreads, and toppings. This book features 40 tempting recipes plus preparation tips. 25 color photos.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #380618 in Books
• Published on: 1996-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 120 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This handsome cookbook gathers recipes not so much for polenta (although there is a brief chapter on standard polenta cooking) as for a pleasing variety of dishes using cornmeal, sometimes in fairly peripheral ways. Many of the entrees employ polenta in its tried and true use as a mild serving bed: Soft Polenta with Braised Italian Sausage; Braised Beef Short Ribs; Bricked Game Hens with Savoy Cabbage on Polenta Croutes. Such variations as Baby Greens with Blood Oranges and Sage-Prosciutto Polenta Croutons and Lentils and Greens in Broth with Polenta Croutons are interesting, if not innovative. Such dishes as Polenta with Poached Eggs, Smoked Salmon, and Chives; Cinnamon Popovers; and White Corn and Arugula Timbales reflect new California cuisines more than expected Italian foodways and demonstrate the versatility of cornmeal. Although Binns's instructions for cooking the polenta, repeated in each recipe, add an unnecessary fussiness, the dishes themselves have plenty of fresh appeal. Among the trademark recipes contributed by others are Three Cheese Soft Polenta (Evan Kleiman and Vianna LaPlace) and Hans Rockenwagner's Polenta Fries.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
America has taken Italian pasta to its heart and made it a ubiquitous staple contending with mashed potatoes as our favorite comfort food. A few years ago, risotto, Italian braised rice, brought new flavors to the American table. Now polenta seeks the same attention. Like the tomato, cornmeal-based polenta is a gift from the New World to the Old. Confined initially to the northern portion of Italy's peninsula, polenta has taken longer to attract Americans' attention and has had to overcome some resistance. But polenta has now become fashionable. Cooked in stock rather than water, humble cornmeal takes on new flavor dimensions. Binns presents dozens of straightforward ways of serving polenta, ranging from standard appetizers through sweet, fruit-laden desserts. Mark Knoblauch

About the Author
Brigit Legere Binns is a food writer and recipe consultant based in Venice, California, whose work has appeared in various publications, including Food & Wine. She has collaborated on cookbooks with some of Los Angeles's top chefs and assisted on three coo

Debroah Denker has had her work appear in various magazines, including Food & Wine, Bon Appetit, and Health. A former resident of New York, she now resides in San Luis Obispo, California.

Customer Reviews

Something other than Potatoes-Rice-Stuffing
Polenta has started to really come into our diets, and even now we have the quick fix mixes, the packaged rolled variety ready to cut and grill. The Italian invasion is upon us and we're loving it.

Here is a beautiful little book which really gives us a great resource to enhance our use of this corn based delight in so many ways -- small pizzetta, grilled plenta crostini (one of my favorites with smoked trout and mascarpone), Polenta Lasagne, and one borrowed from Rockenwagner's cookbook (which Brigit helped bring to press) Polenta Fries.

This book will not only give the clues to turn out delicious polenta of all varieties but will expand our usage of this delightful side dish ever more. Mail order sources and great color photos abound.

Fab book
I've made about 6 different recipes and they are all wonderful! One in particular, soft polenta with braised sausage sauce, has become my stand-by polenta recipe.