Around the World in Cornmeal Mush

Text and photos by Ellen Kanner 

Cornmeal came from the Indigenous people of Mesoamerica, who called it maize. For them, it was both sacred food and daily sustenance.

The first time I made cornmeal porridge, I was 12. I spooned it, golden and steaming, into a bowl and proudly placed it on the dining room table. 

“Grits!” said my father. Well, what could you do, he was born in the South, after all. 

I corrected him with tweenly hauteur: “Polenta.” 

But my grandfather, the Romanian one, grabbed the bowl and began dolloping the porridge on his plate. “Mamaliga!” He beamed and added a fist-sized blob of butter.  

Turns out we were all right. One type of comfort food has many names. In Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria, if it’s not mamaliga, it’s kulesha. For the Georgians of the Caucasus, it’s gomi. For the Georgians of the American South, it’s grits. In Kenya, it’s ugali. In Botswana, it’s mielie pap.

It’s as though the whole world wants to lay claim to it. 

“Corn was everywhere,” Betty Fussell wrote in The Story of Corn. But it had to start somewhere. 

Corn, cornmeal and cornmeal mush came from the Indigenous people of Mesoamerica, who called it maize. For them, it was both sacred food and daily sustenance. The Mesoamericans were growing, drying and grinding corn for millennia. Then Columbus showed up. He brought corn back to Europe in the 16th century, and we were off to the races.

Cornmeal reached Italy before coming to the Balkans, according to cookbook author and culinary legend Claudia Roden, but it became Romania’s enduring love while the Italians were still making up their minds up about it. 

The Ottoman Turks, who controlled the spice route, introduced dried corn to the Balkans, keeping the wheat they prized for themselves. They even tried rebranding corn as Turkish wheat. The Romanians didn’t care what it was called. Turns out corn grows well in Romania, and it became one of their major crops. 

Once dried, corn keeps indefinitely. Ground into meal, then made into porridge, it morphs into something warming, versatile, filling and affordable. Mamaliga became the country’s mainstay and point of pride. In Romanian, mamaliga means food of gold.

You can make perfect polenta quickly in an Instant Pot. Ten minutes, quick release, and you’re good to go, according to Vegan Under Pressure author Jill Nussinow.

Food of gold it may be, but there was a time mamaliga was more fool’s gold. While Columbus and crew introduced maize to Europe, they hadn’t paid attention to the Indigenous people’s process of nixtamalization, soaking dried corn kernels in a caustic solution of lime or cooking it with ash. This process softens the grains and alters maize’s chemical compounds, making it more digestible and increasing its nutritional value.

Corn is naturally rich in niacin, an essential B vitamin, but we don’t absorb it unless the corn has been treated. Without that critical step, an all-corn-all-the-time diet, common enough in the 19th century, puts you at risk for niacin deficiency and ultimately, pellagra. This disease starts with a severe, scaly skin rash, and gets its name from the Italian pelle agra—rough skin. It can spread throughout the body, impairing digestion and cognition, and can be fatal. 

You can trace the arrival of corn, and later of pellagra, across first Spain, then Italy and Romania, which as recently as 1932, reported 55,000 cases of pellagra,1,500 of them fatal. Turkish and Greek communities suffered, too, as did those in Africa, Asia and the United States. Pellagra reached almost epidemic proportions in the U.S. South at the turn of the 20th century.

First diagnosed in the 1800s, pellagra was thought to be an infectious disease. It wasn’t until 1914 that Dr. Joseph Goldberger, not Romanian but from neighboring Hungary, proved pellagra was a result of vitamin deficiency—it’s malnutrition. While excessive alcohol or drug use can cause pellagra, the most common culprit was corn. 

When corn is nixtamalized, like in hominy or masa harina, it makes pellagra unlikely. So does the addition of niacin-rich foods like mushrooms, meats, beans and dairy, all of which pair beautifully with polenta. It makes my grandfather’s generous addition of butter a little more understandable.

He hadn’t eaten mamaliga since his teens, he said between bites. His mother always kept a pot on the stove for him and his three brothers. They ate it back in Romania, and later, when they moved to Manhattan’s Lower East Side. With cornmeal and water, I’d conjured his forgotten past.

All this was new to me. I’d only made polenta after hearing about this Italian dish that wasn’t pasta or pizza. I’d been intrigued but skeptical: How could cornmeal and water come together to be anything worth eating?  So, I poured four cups of water into a pot, brought it to a boil, added a cup of cornmeal and commenced stirring. 

Impatient by nature, I quickly tired of standing at the stove and stirring. I compensated by turned up the heat. Rookie mistake. Cornmeal porridge seizes up over high heat, and that which doesn’t fly out of the pot and burn you (ouch) becomes one with the bottom of the pot, making for nasty cleanup. Mastering mamaliga means surrendering to the process. Gentle heat and plenty of time yield the creamiest, corniest-tasting product, a mush with merit. 

Some recipes call for a soupier dish, while others are quite dense. For me, a good middleground is four to five parts water or broth to one part cornmeal, slow cooked on the stovetop. How slow? At least half an hour, stirring (and sometimes splattering) all the while. The stirring and splattering can be bypassed by baking mamaliga, but it takes twice as long. 

Cheer up, you can make perfect polenta quickly in an Instant Pot. Ten minutes, quick release, and you’re good to go, according to Vegan Under Pressure author Jill Nussinow. Other modern iterations like polenta in a tube and instant grits are convenient, but devotees of cornmeal mush may be anywhere from displeased to horrified by their texture and flavor.

Mamaliga has even been enshrined in literature. In Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula, Jonathan Harker, en route to meet with Count Dracula, stops at Transylvania’s Hotel Royale, where he breakfasts on “a sort of porridge of maize flour which they said was mamaliga.”

The Romanians keep that tradition alive. They cook mamaliga in a special ceaun (means kettle or cauldron), so it’s ready any time of day. It can be served as a hot porridge, lavished with butter, as both my Romanian grandfather and Southern-born dad liked it, or with cheese or sour cream. It can also be a plinth for stews, or just as often, poured out onto a wooden board and allowed to cool and firm up. It’s then sliced, not with a knife, but with a string. Slices can be eaten cold or fried. Cracks in the top of the mamaliga presage a journey ahead, according to a charming bit of Romanian folklore, but there may be something to it. I love to travel, and I’ve got Romanian ancestry.

Cornmeal mush is a seasoned traveler, too, migrating from the New World in the 1500s, establishing itself in Spain, Italy, Romania, then Asia and Africa, coming back to America to be grown across the Midwest and relished by my Floridian father and Romanian grandfather.

For a simple food with many names, cornmeal mush provides a lot of pleasure. It lends itself to almost every cuisine, Italian, African, Southern, Slavic and more. It’s a culturally appropriate food for many cultures and comfort food in every language.