Mămăligă cu brânză – Romanian baked mamaliga with cheese

Mamaliga with cheese (Mămăligă cu brânză) is a baked polenta with feta cheese very popular in Romania and elsewhere in the Balkans. Baking isn’t necessary; you could prepare fresh polenta and layer it with cheese, then more polenta. People often serve mamaliga with poached or over-easy eggs, chunky tomato sauce or sour cream. You can eat it any time of day even though it sounds like a breakfast dish.

Corn didn’t arrive in Romania until the mid 1500s. Before that, people made porridges from millet, einkorn or other grains. These porridges could be cooked very thick or baked to make a bread-like dish. But corn became the grain of choice for this everyday, versatile dish. Serve mamaliga plain as a side with chicken ciulama or enjoy it on its own. I like this version of mamaliga with cheese precisely because it can stand alone.

The mamaliga with cheese recipe

This is a very straightforward recipe that shouldn’t take you much time at all to prepare. A few minutes to gather and measure your ingredients, 20 minutes on the stovetop and 20 minutes or so in the oven. It’s so easy, you can make it any day of the week. And it starts with just boiling 2 cups of water in a 4-quart or larger pot.

Set your oven to 375°F and when it comes to temp put a few strips of bacon on a small sheet pan and bake in the oven. Meanwhile, as the water comes to boil, measure out 1 cups cornmeal. Turn the water down to a simmer after it comes to a boil; add the cornmeal and a teaspoon of salt to the water. Stir continually for about 20 minutes or until the porridge starts to firm up and pull away from the side of your pot. When it is thick enough to stand on its own your mamaliga is fully cooked. You could stop here and serve it as polenta as a side for any number of things or with a dollop of sour cream and crumbled feta.

We are going to bake some feta into our mamaliga, however. Crumble 1½ cups of feta cheese into the cornmeal porridge and stir in 1/4 cup melted butter.

Remove the bacon from the oven and pour off the drippings.

Add the drippings to the mamaliga and stir. Spoon the cheesy porridge into a greased pan (I used a 9-inch pie plate but you could use any similarly sized oven-safe dish; I wish I’d used something smaller so the baked mamaliga would have been thicker). Put the dish into the preheated oven and bake for about 20 minutes. Crumble the bacon for topping later.

The mamaliga will brown just a little and get a bit crispy on the edges but that’s all. Remove from the oven, top with the crumbled bacon and let it cool.

Cut into pieces and serve warm, with some sour cream or grated cheese on top. I used kashkaval (cașcaval), a semi-firm light yellow cheese.

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