Polenta e Schie

The dish comes from Venice and its lagoon. Schie (singular schia) is the Venetian dialect name for the tiny grey shrimp Crangon crangon, the small grey crustacean that lives on the muddy floor of the lagoon and near the mouths of the rivers feeding it; it averages three to five centimetres and is fished in the cold months, roughly October to March, when it moves into the shallows. Long regarded as a poor man's catch, the schia was eaten chiefly by the lagoon's less wealthy families before being taken up by higher-end kitchens in recent decades. It is paired with the white polenta traditional to the Veneto: the region's heritage white maize, biancoperla — documented in the Veneto since the seventeenth century and now a Slow Food Presidium — yields a pale, delicate polenta that the Veneto serves specifically with river and lagoon fish, schie among them. The exact origin of the dish is unrecorded; it belongs to the everyday cooking of the lagoon rather than to any single cook or date. Today it is a staple cicchetto, the small plate served in the bacari, Venice's traditional wine bars.

The shrimp are sweet and briny with a faint bitter edge, tiny enough that the thin shells turn delicate and crisp; eaten whole, they give a fine crunch that is part of the point. Beneath them lies soft, loose, warm white polenta — pourable rather than set, mild and faintly sweet — and the whole is bound by the green-grassy parsley, the bite of garlic and the fruity weight of olive oil.

The white polenta is cooked low and slow in salted water, the maize starch gelatinizing as the grains hydrate and swell so the mush thickens evenly; for this dish it is kept morbida — soft and fluid, stirred and loosened with extra water rather than left to set firm, since it must spoon out and spread under the shrimp. The schie cook in only two to three minutes: they are tiny, so brief heat sets their proteins and renders the shells crisp, while longer cooking drives out moisture and turns the flesh rubbery. They are dropped into a soffritto of garlic gently warmed in olive oil — kept below browning so the garlic perfumes the oil without turning bitter — finished with parsley off the heat to keep it green. When very small the shrimp are eaten whole, shell and head included; larger ones are quickly peeled.