(Jewish Group) This Romanian Jewish polenta is the ultimate comfort food
Back in the 1980s, when polenta was the hot new item on restaurant menus, I was eager to try it. I knew it was a traditional Italian dish, but it was foreign to everyone else, including me. I bought a package of cornmeal, began the preparation, and when it was done I realized I had been eating it all my life. It was the same dish Jonathan Harker ate before his encounter with Count Dracula in Bram Stoker’s novel, known in the American South as “cornmeal mush” and as “pap” in South Africa. But I knew it as mamaliga, which had been a staple in my grandma’s Romanian kitchen.
Because mamaliga was such an essential food in our lives, I didn’t realize that most of my Jewish friends had never heard of it. The hallways in the buildings we lived in all had the same familiar scents of Ashkenazi staples we all knew — chicken soup, challah, braising briskets, and roasting chickens. Shared values and menus.
Except when it came to mamaliga, which I learned was limited to those of us whose ancestors were from Romania.
While our family was dining on cornmeal mush, everyone else was eating kasha varnishkes, a dish I ate regularly only after tasting it at my future mother-in-law’s house (it was love at first bite).
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