A dish that you know is good for you

Garden pea and broad bean stew with cheesy polenta wedges

Welcome to Recipes and Stories from Eastern Europe. I'm Irina Georgescu, a James Beard award-winning author specialising in Eastern European cuisine. My newsletter offers free recipes and travel inspiration from this part of Europe, including Romania and Transylvania, where I’m from. You can support this free publication by purchasing my books, available in bookstores and online worldwide: 'Carpathia', 'Tava' and 'Danube'* Thank you.

I recently attended the Ideal Home Show, an interior decoration show very well known here in the UK. The food and drink section is huge, occupying half of the first floor at the Olympia exhibition centre in London. It has an international ‘street food’ vibe and even its own Aperol and Pimm’s bars! I loved that, and it was tempting, but I came by car, so...

I was invited to do two live cookery demonstrations on the Food and Drink stage. I chose this garden pea and broad bean stew with cheesy polenta wedges because it was easy to make and allowed me time to focus on the talking. The talking was mainly about the cuisines I discovered along the Danube River, the people I met and the recipes they shared with me, all of which you can read in my book ‘Danube’*.

The recipes in ‘Danube’* are approachable and accessible, use staple ingredients, and come together in no time. What I cooked at the Ideal Home Show reflected this style, and people said to me ‘you look at this dish and you know it is good for you’ or ‘I never thought of cooking polenta this way’ and better yet ‘I never knew how to make a polenta’ This is the kind of response I look for when someone cooks from my books.

To be honest, another breakthrough came when, together with Andrew, who was the stage host, we got the crowd to say ‘mămăligă’ for the picture below, instead of the traditional ‘say cheese’. Mămăligă means polenta in Romanian. It was fun! Who would have thought…

Can we have a dairy-free polenta?

Someone in the audience asked me this question, because in many cases, we add butter, cheese, sour cream, cream, milk, more cheese and so on to a polenta to make it flavoursome. But what if you can’t eat dairy and the dairy-free alternatives don’t quite work, don’t melt or blend quite in the same way?

The best way to enjoy the sunny flavour of polenta, the delicate sweetness of corn and its natural buttery flavour is to use stone-ground cornmeal. Cook it low and slow, allow the cornmeal to absorb the liquid slowly, and you’ll have a polenta that doesn’t need any dairy to be creamy. It’s in its nature to be gluten and dairy-free.

A lot of the cornmeal we find in shops today is finely ground, with the bran and oil removed from the grain so that it cooks quickly and it doesn’t go rancid. By removing them to prolong its shelf life, the producers or millers also remove most of its nutritious and tasty bits. The texture is also affected by the fact that the cooking time is very short. The flavour doesn’t have time to develop much. So, if you can, order stone ground cornmeal online (I buy Mulino Marino from Bakery Bits UK), and keep it in the freezer to extend its shelf life.

Stirring constantly?

You don’t have to stir a polenta constantly. When you buy the stone ground cornmeal, you’ll be a little alarmed to read that it takes 60 minutes to cook. It doesn’t. It’s around 40 minutes. Add the cornmeal to the boiling water, then turn the heat on to the lowest setting, put the lid on, and allow it to cook gently. No need to stir constantly, two or three times will be enough.

Garden Pea and Broad Bean Stew with Cheesy Polenta Wedges

The recipe

Ingredients

Serves 4

For making the stew

sunflower oil, for frying

2 medium brown onions, finely sliced

2 medium carrots, peeled and sliced

a pinch of salt

400 g tinned chopped tomatoes

300 ml passata

300 g garden peas, fresh or frozen

200 g broad beans, shelled, fresh or frozen

40 g fresh dill, chopped

15 ml white wine vinegar (or more if you prefer)

For making polenta

800 ml water

1 teaspoon salt

200 g polenta (cornmeal)

50 g salted butter

100g Cheddar

Method:

Heat a thin layer of oil on the base of a deep frying pan over medium heat. Cook the onions and carrots with a pinch of salt until they caramelise slightly, then add the tomatoes and passata. Stir well and cook for 5 more minutes, then add the peas and beans together with three-quarters of the dill. Taste for seasoning and adjust to your liking. If the flavours are too delicate, it means it needs more salt. Cook until everything is heated evenly, then stir in the vinegar and cook for another 3 minutes. Keep the pan on the low heat while you fry the polenta.

Meanwhile, make the polenta by bringing the water with salt to the boil. Use a whisk to stir the cornmeal in, turn the heat to low, cover the pan and allow the water to be absorbed slowly. Adjust the salt levels, usually adding more. Cornmeal, like rice, benefits from a generous amount of salt. When it's ready, turn the polenta onto a chopping board or lined tray and spread it evenly into a 1-2cm thick layer. Allow it to cool for 10 minutes, then cut it into cubes as little or as large as you wish.

Heat the butter in a large frying pan over a high heat. Add the polenta cubes and fry for 10 minutes, tossing and turning them gently, until they form a golden crust. Grate the cheese on top.

Serve the stew with the polenta slices on top and sprinkle with the rest of the dill.

Notes:

The dill

I know. It’s a love-hate relationship with dill. I can’t offer an alternative that works quite like dill in this dish. It’s a marriage made in heaven. Garden peas and dill make a combination that will change your mind about this herb. It’s refreshing in many other combinations, such as lettuce salad. Or cucumber salad. Or potato salad. Or meatballs. It works in a way that brings out the best in these ingredients: it enhances the freshness and opposes the starchiness and fattiness.

Technically, dill was added by some very wise people back at the dawn of time to improve digestion. Cucumber is not very digestible. Starch and fat are the same. So when they reach your stomach, dill is there to help.

The vinegar

Adding vinegar to a stew may not be the first thing that springs to your mind as a way of boosting flavours. It works, especially if, like so many people around the world, we use tinned tomatoes that may lack the right levels of acidity. In this sweet and sour sauce, the vinegar acts like a highlighter, bringing the sourness forward and intensifying the sweetness of both tomatoes and peas. It has been a staple ingredient in this part of Eastern Europe since the time of the ancient Roman Empire, which ruled over these lands and had a fondness for vinegar. In Romania, we use it in soups and stews, and in the past, we used verjus. Verjus is made with unripe grapes, and in a country that lives and breathes wine, it’s only natural to waste nothing and use the unripe grapes to make vinegar.

Catherine Phipps, the Queen of Pressure Cooking

If you haven’t yet discovered Catherine Phipps insightful newsletter, this post could change your life. Her commitment to helping people cook healthily and quickly using a pressure cooker with confidence is unwavering. I have her books, even though I don’t own a pressure cooker, just to try her recipes, which are easily adaptable to standard methods. Good, honest, and unfussy dishes that feed a family. However, many people find themselves in the opposite situation: they use a pressure cooker on a daily basis but many books they would love to have are not tailored to this method. Catherine generously reviews these books and adapts the methods for her community.

By doing so, she also supports authors like me at the beginning of their writing journey and brings their work to the attention of a wider audience. For that, I couldn’t be more grateful. Here is the piece she wrote about my work:

Pressure Cooking the Books 7

*Where to buy ‘Danube’

The book is available anywhere in the world, just google it so you can get the nearest option to you and the best value for money. In the UK: Waterstones, Bookshop.org, Hive, and Amazon. In the U.S.: Barnes and Noble, Omnivore Books, Kitchen Arts and Letters, Book Larder, and Amazon. In Canada: Indigo. In Australia: Booktopia. In Romania: Librăriile Cărturești.