Rachel Roddy’s recipe for leftover polenta biscuits | A kitchen in Rome

A biscuit crossed with a flapjack crossed with a bread pudding: these snacks are best enjoyed with a hot drink

This, then, was the situation: it was Friday night after a long week, and having met a friend on the way home for a glass of wine, which arrived with crisps, taralli, dry roasted peanuts and enough salt that we needed another glass, it seemed a good idea to go home and cook polenta – the long-stir sort as opposed to the instant variety, although I always have that in the cupboard, too. Another good idea, which came to me as I pulled a new packet from the back of the dresser and ignored the flutter of tiny wings, was to make more than enough polenta and pour the extra into a Pyrex dish while it was still hot, so it could set into a block to be cut into slices and grilled the next day.

I’ve written about polenta before; how the word is ancient and generic – referring to any mushy dish made from cereal flour and water – and how, after its arrival in Europe in the 1600s, it became synonymous with ground maize. There exists a world of different grades and milling, but, broadly speaking, when you buy ground maize (cornmeal) for polenta, you will have two options: finely ground (which might also be white) for a soft, thin polenta, and coarsely ground, which will have glassy-looking grains and makes an excellent body scrub and a harder, tastier polenta. The latter also takes much longer to cook, anything from 40 minutes to several hours, depending on who (or which packet) you consult, although in my experience an hour is almost always enough, and anything beyond that is more a way of deepening the flavour. Stirring is also a matter of opinion, with some saying it must be constant, while others (hello, Anna Del Conte!) noting that after 10 minutes, if the heat is low enough, you can in fact leave the pan to attend to other things, coming back every now and then to give it a strong, hard stir.