SC - A Dilemma on what to cook for Dinner-HELP!

[Christina Nevin]

I believe you will find polenta is used to describe cereal grains cooked
drier than a puls and often shaped into loaves.  Apicius gives a recipe for
wheat polenta and Cato (IIRC) gives one for barley.

There is a 29 year window when maize could have been used in Leonardo's
lifetime.  Of this, the most probable period he would have come in contact
with maize is his second Florentine stay from 1500 to 1515.  After this time
he was in France and before it he was serving Milan in a often itinerant
capacity.

I don't recall any references to Leonardo and maize, although if it had been
available his experimental bent would probably have made him one of the
first to use it.  I would say the connection is probably apocryphal.

As for the maize, it may have been in use in Italy early in the 16th
Century.  It was probably imported by the Venetians who were the major
traders between Spain and Turkey.  It was certainly known by the end of the
16th Century.

Bear

> "ana l. valdes" wrote:
> > 
> > I had the great polenta recipe.
> > Here it comes:
> > 
> > Boil one liter water on a pan
> > Add the polenta (200 grams to a liter water) grain and take away of the
> > stove
> 
> This sounds lovely! I have a question, though. If this is indeed
> attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, that would put it at the late 15th,
> early 16th centuries. Do we have any reason to believe that the polenta
> grain called for (if the word polenta is used) is in fact maize? Hasn't
> polenta referred in the past to both chestnut meal and barley meal
> cereal? Da Vinci's contemporary, Platina, seems to refer to polenta as a
> barley meal product.
> 
> I'm sure it's lovely made with those, too, though!
> 
> Adamantius
> -- 
> Phil & Susan Troy
> 
> 
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