24 March 2011 True grits

This has nothing to do with the movie starring John Wayne. I must admit that the scene with Wayne riding with the reins in his teeth, shooting with both hands is one of the best things he ever did as an actor. But this has nothing to do with that movie.

It has even less to do with the remake of the movie starring Wayne. I haven’t bothered to see it. I don’t know who acted in it and truthfully don’t care. The prices for movie admissions have become impossibly expensive. The concessions prices even more so. Since I don’t drink soft drinks I don’t have to feel gouged by the bottler/distributors. The price for a bucket of over-salted, greasy popcorn would feed many families their evening meal. But this is not about either the non-Wayne movie or overpriced concessions.

This is about cornmeal. This is about food, of a sort, depending upon where you had the good fortune to be born and to grow up.

To learn more about grits, hominy and regular, follow the link. http://www.grits.com/discript.htm

The subject arises because I am fixing shrimp and cheese grits for dinner tonight.

This is a southern coastal dish, born of poverty and chance, and now celebrated by the middle and upper class of the region in books, restaurant reviews, and even song – so I’ve been told. I have southern ancestry so I’ve eaten grits.

One of the prime rules in southern cooking as practiced by my grandparent’s generation – for that matter by both sets of grandparents – was to never serve meat that might be the least bit rare. Another was to boil all vegetables until they no longer had any defined form, then to boil them for another 1o minutes just to be sure. Grits fall under the latter category and rule. They are grits here, polenta in Italy, corn-meal mush in the U.S. North East, and numerous other names in those parts of the world where they are considered edible.

How to cook them is hotly contested. I’ve been on fishing trips where the southern contingent got up at 0: dark-thirty to start boiling milk to use in boiling grits. It makes no difference what they boil it in, it tastes the same - behind poi in the flavor cavalcade. The northern contingent, when asked for comments, all agreed that they’d never tasted anything quite like the breakfast paste offered them. I’ve seen northern contingents prepare oatmeal and eaten my share with due appreciation while the southern folks muttered loudly about in adequate food.

However they are prepared, grits are a blank slate for the cook. Flavoring them during preparation helps their palatability. Failing that, flavoring them before consumption is essential. I’ve eaten them baked with cheese, boiled with other cheeses and butter, heavily laden with sorghum molasses, spike with red-eye gravy, and several other ways that should not be mentioned in polite society. While I may live in the south, I was born and educated in the north. Grits are edible but it helps to have something else of highly appreciated flavor to remind one’s palate that it has not been forsaken and condemned to some southern gulag.