Mămăligă
Mămăligă (/mə.mə'li.gə/, cornmeal mush) is a Romanian dish made out of yellow maize. It is better known to the rest of the world in its Italian form, polenta.
Mămăligă is one of the main traditional dishes of Romania. Historically a peasant food, it was often used as a substitute for bread or even as a staple food in the poor rural areas. However, in the last decades it has emerged as an upscale dish available in the finest restaurants.
Traditionally, mămăligă is cooked by boiling water, salt and cornmeal in a special-shaped cast iron pot called ceaun. When cooked peasant-style and used as a bread substitute, Romanian mămăligă is supposed to be much thicker than the regular Italian polenta to the point that it can be cut in slices, like bread. When cooked for other purposes, mămăligă can be much softer, sometimes almost to the consistency of porridge.
Mămăligă is often served with sour cream and cheese on the side (mămăligă cu brânză şi smântână) or crushed in a bowl of hot milk (mămăligă cu lapte). Sometimes slices of mămăligă are pan-fried in oil or in lard, the result being a sort of corn pones.
Since mămăligă can be used as an alternate for bread in many Romanian dishes, there are quite a few which are either based on mămăligă, or include it in some way. Arguably, the most popular of them is sarmale (a type of cabbage rolls) with mămăligă.
Another very popular Romanian dish based on mămăliga is called bulz, and consists of balls of mămăligă filled with cheese and butter and roasted in the oven.
Balmoş (sometimes spelled balmuş) is another mămăligă-like traditional Romanian dish, but is more elaborate. Unlike mămăligă (where the cornmeal is boiled in water) when making balmoş the cornmeal must be boiled in sheep milk. Other ingredients, such as butter, sour cream, telemea (a type of feta cheese), caş (a type of fresh curdled ewe cheese without whey, which is sometimes called "green cheese" in English), urdă (a type of curdled cheese obtained by boiling and curdling the whey left from caş), etc., are added to the mixture at certain times during the cooking process. It is a specialty dish of the Romanian shepherds of old, and nowadays very few people still know how to make a proper balmoş.
Mămăligă is a very versatile food: various recipes of mămăligă-based dishes may include milk, butter, various types of cheese, eggs, sausages (usually fried, grilled or oven-roasted), bacon, mushrooms, ham, etc. Mămăliga is a fat-free, cholesterol-free, high-fiber food. It can be used as a healthy alternative to more refined carbohydrates such as white bread, pasta or hulled rice.
Trivia
- A gruel made of cornmeal, water, milk, butter, salt and sugar is called in Romania cir de mămăligă. If it is exceedingly thin and made only of cornmeal, water and salt it is called mieşniţă.
- Before the arrival of maize in Romania, mămăligă was made of millet flour, but millet mămăligă is no longer made.
- Owing to the Romanians' wide association with the dish, Romanian people are sometimes derogatorily called мамалиги (mamaligi) or мамалигари (mamaligari) by Bulgarians, although the dish exists in Bulgaria as well under the name kachamak.