Immigrant Kitchens: April 2010

Romanian Polenta With Sheep's Milk Feta

Polenta always kinda scared me. The water to grain ratio was not an easy 2:1 like rice. The polenta packages are for weird amounts: 17.6 oz? And the directions say to do something with liters. Yikes. I'm off thinking I need to hunt down an empty soda bottle. My discomfort was really because I didn't grow up with the stuff. Bogdan and Laura Coroi from Bucharest were kind enough to show me their grandmothers' tricks. "It's not rocket science as they say," said Laura. This is coming from a nuclear physicist, but still. I see with my own eyes their family's polenta dish is ultimate comfort food both to make and to eat. Click at right for the full story, how-to photos and the recipe.

The Story

For Richer, For Poorer

Romanian Polenta with Sheep’s Milk Feta

By Lindsay Sterling

Laura Coroi saw my Immigrant Kitchens poster at the YMCA and introduced herself. She’s from Romania and loves to cook. So days later here we are in her yellow house in Yarmouth where she lives with her husband, Bogdan, also from Romania, and their two kids, Alex and Sabina, who were born here. On the counter are 4 hardboiled eggs, a bag of Bellino polenta, butter, and a white tub of Bulgarian feta. Her eyes are wide just looking at this cheese (you can get it at Italian markets like Micucci’s on India St. in Portland, Maine).

As we cook Laura shares what it was like growing up in Bucharest in the ‘80’s. She remembers wearing her winter jacket in the classroom because the government turned off the heat. She cut off the tips of her gloves so she could wear them while she took notes. “You would like the subway to last forever,” she says. It was the only place that was always warm. One time she came home to find her mother crying. They were dizzy with hunger (the government rationed just 1 pound of meat and 3 eggs for protein per person per month!) but worse, she couldn’t offer her cold daughter a simple cup of tea. The government controlled the water, too. At their house, it wouldn’t go on until 7. And then her grandparents, parents, and siblings all had only one half hour to wash themselves, their clothes and dishes, and to gather water for cooking. It didn’t matter if you were rich or poor. Laura’s father was an aerospace engineer. This was communism.

Bogdan is mimicking his grandmother, wrestling the thickening polenta with a wooden dowel called a facalet. Laura laughs at him and at both their grandmothers’ pride in keeping the lumps out. In an ovenproof dish she mashes a hunk of cheese with a fork into crumbles. Then she layers slices of hardboiled egg over them, pours the polenta over the egg, and puts the dish in the oven.

All that talk of rationing brings up the story of how she came here. In her twenties she was working in the office of a nuclear power plant near Bucharest. Bogdan worked there too in construction. Their families had been friends a long time, but she wanted to know more. Like what would it be like to spend the weekend with him on the Black Sea Coast? Laura’s father offered Bogdan his rationed gasoline (one person could get just 5 gallons a month). Bogdan sucked the siphoning tube, shoved it into his gas tank, and listened with excitement to his tank filling. The coast proved positive. The couple married in Bucharest, and soon after Bogdan was accepted at the University of Missouri’s nuclear engineering department in the United States. She followed, and got into graduate school there, too. Fifteen years later, he works at a Maine hospital determining radiation amounts for cancer patients, and she encourages her son’s dream of attending MIT by strategically placing physics books around the house.

Bogdan and Laura serve their favorite dish, mamaliga cu ou si branza (polenta with egg and cheese) in his grandmother’s Romanian pottery. Each bite is at once creamy and mild, salty and oozing, that powdery egg yolk balancing perfectly in the middle. She calls it comfort food. Indeed, it’s thick and steaming and satisfying. It’s double comfort to know that it doesn’t take much to make. I recall just four ingredients: polenta, egg, butter, and feta. Plus water. I always take that one for granted.

The Recipe

Romanian Polenta With Sheep's Milk Feta

As Laura Coroi, from Bucharest, Romania, taught Lindsay Sterling

in Yarmouth, ME, May 2010

Serves 4-6

Time: about 50 minutes

4 eggs

1 c. Bulgarian sheep's milk Feta (look for it at Micucci's Italian Grocery*

1 1/2 Tbsp butter cut into small pieces

1/2 package (about 7 oz) Bellino instant polenta (Micucci's has this too)

Hardboil eggs. Preheat oven to 350. In bottom of ovenproof dish mash feta into crumbles with a fork. Add butter and mash into cheese. Fill medium pot half way with cold water. Turn on heat. Add enough polenta so that it's the consistency of heavy cream and then stir while heating (to avoid lumps) until it's thick but still pourable. (If it's too thick, add more water, too thin, add more polenta). Peel eggs, slice and lay pieces on top of the cheese. Pour polenta over the top, and put dish in oven for about thirty minutes.

Micucci's: 207-775-1854, 45 India St. Portland, ME

Please contact me with comments or questions about this recipe:

lindsay@lindsaysterling.com