POLENTA MARCHIGIANA From the Marche region of Italy comes this ultimate comfort food Polenta is basically cornmeal mush cooked to a very soft, creamy consistency Top with tomato sauce, and bits of sausage, meal or seafood.

Where else would you find fried cornmeal mush ($3.95) that, for only a dollar more, can be topped with your choice of sausage or hamburger gravy?

"'Tis called polenta, Robin, and as a floor covering it hath no equal" explained the salesman: The title of Baxter's 2004 framed ink-and-pastel drawing almost needs no visual accompaniment, but it's made all the funnier by a rendition of the fictional rebel hero watching as a huge yellow sheet of the cornmeal mush is laid out in a Sherwood Forest clearing.

Along with cubed steak, our table featured other foodstuffs that were to disappear as times improved: homefermented kraut, catfish and an occasional steamed carp; fried cornmeal mush with syrup made from choke-cherries picked along the Burlington tracks.

Indirect allusions, subtle irony and symbolic gestures are other devices Johnson uses to illustrate her meanings as we see in such poems as "Cornmeal Mush" and "Snow Cream," which are portraits of a father and a mother in the act of expressing love.

An American mock-epic, Joel Barlow's The Hasty Pudding (1796), celebrates his favorite New England dish, cornmeal mush, in three 400-line cantos.

Most of the time then, we were just living on corn, cornmeal mush, bread and some milk," McCormick recalled.

If you sit down and read an entire Dave Barrybook in one night - this qualifies your mind to be cooked the next morning for breakfast as cornmeal mush - you can see that many of the devices he's employed in the 13 ensuing years were obvious in that first piece.

Working over a simple fireplace in the middle of a poorly ventilated, thatched dwelling, the women prepared a batch of sadza - a thick cornmeal mush that serves as a dietary staple -- using each fuel.

Mama leaned over the makeshift stove, frying a spoonful of cornmeal mush and reboiling last week's coffee for her and her grown daughters.

SOME PEOPLE WOULD SAY THAT POLENTA IS SNAZZY cornmeal mush. It's true that polenta starts out like most hot cereals, with a dried grain whisked into hot water.

Polenta, for example, was served in my home when I was a child only it was called cornmeal mush, and as James Beard used to say, "You know, pate is nothing more than meat loaf!"

Cornmeal mush is a thick cornmeal pudding or porridge that is often cut into flat squares or rectangles and then fried.