The Capsule Pantry: Salsiccia Con Polenta (Sausage with Polenta) 18+ Ways

The best kind of sauce is sausage sauce

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Last night’s dinner snapped on the balcony before I devoured the lot

I want to start this Recipe Wednesday with a note from the Grand Dame of British cooking, Nigella Lawson. As I was nosing one of her books a few weeks back, I was struck by this sentence:

And so I gently remind myself, and you, that the recipe writer’s role is to be a guide in the kitchen, not its ruling monarch

If there were ever 25 words to sum up the spirit of Recipe Wednesday, these are them.

My recipes are not there be followed to the letter, but to be bent and shaped to your will, to what is available in your storecupboard. Because flexibility = less waste = more money = more time = simpler life.

Nigella’s words feed nicely into this week’s recipe of “salsiccia con polenta” - sausage with polenta. I found a recipe for sausage pasta that sounded pretty tasty in a recipe book (it was so long ago, I can’t even remember whose). The sauce was made with Italian fennel sausages, chili flakes, red wine, and cherry tomatoes. I didn’t have red wine open, only white. I had no cherry tomatoes but I did have passata. The sausages I had in the fridge were not fennel flavored, but I did have fennel seeds in my cupboard. No pasta, but I did have polenta.

This was a recipe ripe for adaptation. The result is something I make on an almost weekly basis. There are infinite adaptations you can make to the ingredients which, of course, is the beauty of a recipe like this.

Let’s do it.