I don’t actually have a recipe for this one, but I’d read on a number of websites that Roman soldiers cooked and ate a lot of buckwheat polenta, and I thought this would be as good a time as any to expound upon my love for this miraculous grain-like grass.

Polenta is a famous Italian dish, usually based on cornmeal. However, corn came from the Americas. So what did Italians use before corn? Many different grains, among them buckwheat, which was introduced from the Middle East (and, before that, from the rest of Asia) during ancient wars.

Buckwheat is easy to cook, versatile, high in protein, easy to grow, and gluten-free. You can grind it into flour. You can cook the groats in a thermos of boiling water in fifteen minutes (I regularly do this for dorm meals). Soba noodles are made out of it. Buckwheat originated in East Asia, where it formed a base for many dishes where rice was unavailable or could not easily be cultivated. Today, it is a staple grain throughout Eastern Europe and Asia. It was also a staple of my childhood. Buckwheat with milk was a familiar cereal, while buckwheat with savory ingredients for dinner was also a frequent delight. I am so excited to share this wonderful grain with all of you today.

Polenta, on its principle, involves cooking grain or grain meal until it becomes mushy, and then stirring it, and sometimes adding dairy, until it becomes creamy. Simple enough, right?

In retrospect, I should have tried to grind up my buckwheat, even roughly. It would have sped up the process and left me with something slightly more polenta-like. Still, this pot of buckwheat mush cooked within an hour. Here is how I did it:

Boil about two cups of water with one cup of (rinsed) buckwheat groats. Add chopped onions. Simmer, mix, and mash with a fork as often as you feel like checking on it. Towards the end, add a few tablespoons of parmesan cheese, and stir until fully integrated. Serve hot, or cold, or whatever your heart desires.

Though I do wish I’d ground the buckwheat beforehand, I did end up with something that tasted recognizably like polenta, and had reached a creamy consistency not unlike overcooked oatmeal. Despite that maybe unappealing comparison, it actually tasted okay- like creamy buckwheat with notes of cheese and onions.

It looks like oatmeal, it tastes like oatmeal, it was a waste of time.

Was it worth it? I think not. I could have just boiled the buckwheat in fifteen minutes and eaten it. I don’t understand how people pack polenta into logs they can then cut slices off of. I could have attempted something with this, but just imagine storing a log of mushy oatmeal and chopping bits off of it- gross and unnecessary. As it were, I could have just cooked the buckwheat the normal way. Perhaps polenta was the go-to if Romans were carrying buckwheat flour, and not whole groats. I would understand this more. It wasn’t that bad, but I don’t know if it was worth the time and effort.

Incidentally, cleaning the pot after this was absolutely awful. There was a thick layer of stuff attached to the bottom of it, just like when you wayyyyyy overcook oatmeal. So that was unpleasant. Maybe I could have avoided it somehow by being better at polenta. I don’t know.

Final thoughts: this was fine. It tasted fine. I would hate to be the Roman soldier tasked with washing cookware.