Grits is Good!
Yes it is. If you only ate one grit at a time it would be grits ARE good. But, hey...
When I was a little kid my aunt, Titter, gifted me with a breakfast on occasional Saturday mornings at her house which included grits. On the plate would be an egg sunny side up, a piece of toast, two slices of bacon and a mound of hot grits. To me, it was liquefied popcorn. I ate the grits first then dawdled over the egg, the bacon and the toast, sometimes secretly lodging bits of all three under the rim of my plate. Then I’d ask for more grits. Today, I consider myself sufficiently well versed in grits to be a grits aficionado. If you need to know about grits, try me.
The image of grits as a lowbrow food comes from its cheap abundance across much of the southern United States. Native Americans taught their European invaders how to make grits and then, in the period after the devastation of the Civil War, people in the South turned to grits as a cheap but tasty staple. It is less so today but still widely popular from the Carolinas to Texas, especially for breakfast. I feel sorry for everybody else
The corn produced for food in a season can’t be consumed all at once by humans and animals so it has to be stored someplace. Dried corn grits is an excellent option for that. This was certainly the case before freezers became common.
Of course the best way to store your corn in those bygone years, especially if you aren’t close to a river or a railroad, is by converting it into whiskey. However, there’s a problem with that. After George Washington and the U.S. Army ended the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 in western Pennsylvania, you had to lay pretty low if you were storing your corn crop as a clear liquid in jars, so grits became an ideal way to put corn aside for future use without needing to run from the revenuers.
Much of the grits served in the South today is not the old-fashioned, stone-ground corn porridge of yesteryear. That is increasingly hard to find because it is labor-intensive. However, there are now shelf-stable packaged grits in abundance in your grocery store and they are almost as good. Grits is so much taken for granted now that many restaurants just boil up pots of “instant” grits with no butter and little salt, thereby missing some of that old-fashioned richness. This has given grits a bad reputation which is reinforced by subsequent encounters at any place which considers grits as just a plate filler
The “Indian Givers” Gave Us Grits!
Corn or maize was used as a staple in the diets of native American people starting about 8,000 years ago. That is a very long time, stretching back to 3,000 years before the pyramids of Egypt had been visualized in the fertile brain of Imhotep, the man who designed the first one for the Pharaoh Djoser. Corn is native to the Americas. The earliest settlers from Europe learned to use it from native tribes. It is now consumed virtually across the entire world. It is also used nowadays to produce ethanol for use in combustion engines and the debate still rages whether that is wasteful or economical, which has no bearing on the enjoyment of a good Bourbon on the rocks made from corn mash or a steaming plate of shrimp and grits.
Shrimp N’ Grits: it’s not just for breakfast anymore
Shrimp n’ grits originated in the coastal fishing towns along the coast of North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia and has been enjoyed by the locals there as a breakfast dish for generations. That all changed in 1982, when a chef named Bill Neal came on as a chef at a restaurant in Chapel Hill, NC, named Crook’s Corner. Neal blended hot grits with Parmesan and cheddar cheeses and served plates of it mounded over with large shrimp, mushrooms, bacon and chopped shallots. A review of this ran in the New York Times and, practically overnight, upscale restaurants from Charleston to San Fransisco were putting it on menus. Thank you, to all involved.
You Can Do This
Start by frying 3 slices of bacon and set them aside on a paper towel.
Bring to a boil 2 cups of water, 2 teaspoons chicken base paste, 3/4 cup half & half. Gradually whisk in 1 cup grits, reduce heat to low and stir until thick. Then add 3/4 cup cheddar,1/4 cup Parmesan & 2 Tablespoons butter. Cook on low until done according to package directions. (Add a little water or half&half if it gets too thick).
Cover and set the pot aside. In a skillet with some oil, fry 1 pound of peeled, seasoned shrimp dredged in flour with 1 cup sliced mushrooms, 1/2 cup green onions, 2 cloves minced garlic (adding a little more oil if needed). Cook for about 6 minutes.
When the shrimp are nice and pink, stir in 1/2 cup chicken broth, a few more shakes of Tabasco and some lemon juice. (Also add the bacon, crumbled.)
Serve this over the hot cheese grits. Cold beer is an easy goes-with.
The word for “corn” in America was originally “maize”. Corn itself was derived from the early inhabitants of southern Mexico after the end of the last ice age. Before the America-derived “maize” was known in England, all cereal grains were named “corn”, prominently including wheat.
Another thing you can do is to pour the hot, cooked grits onto a shallow baking pan with sides, cool completely then dump onto a cutting board and cut into rounds with a cookie cutter, dip the rounds into a milk-and-egg wash, coat with flour and bread crumbs and fry in butter until golden brown. Your guests won’t know what they are but they will marvel at how good they taste. And then you can tell them.
The landowners and producers of cereal crops in Britain got laws passed during the Napoleonic Wars which stopped foreign imports of grain from the European continent. This made these people vastly richer. They then forced passage in Parliament of the “Corn Laws”. This caused the price of cereal grains to skyrocket so that poor people had to pay most of their income for bread. This shut down the economy because people didn’t have money left over to buy anything. Such was the airhead wisdom of politicians of that day —- still very much alive in those we elect today. Obviously, the people in Congress don’t eat grits or else they would behave themselves and just stop showing up for work.
American corn winds up, one way or another on just about every dinner table in the country. You might not eat corn on the cob directly but you do ingest corn syrup, corn starch and corn meal in almost every conceivable way daily.
Having grown up in the South, it’s easy to suspect that grits ought to be one of the four major food groups. So it’s puzzling why anyone would turn a nose up at a hot bowl of it with some fresh bacon chips and a pat of melting butter on top.
Well, see, now I can hardly wait for breakfast.
(NOTE: At the bottom of this post you’ll see some action buttons. One of these invites you to leave a comment. I would love to have your thoughts and share them with readers. Don’t like grits? Love grits? Got a good grits recipe? Believe Congress is a criminal enterprise? Whatever. Lay it on me. Thank you.)