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Are you a Grits girl?


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I just came across this riotously titled book: Grits Guide to Life. Grits here is actually an acronym for Girls Raised In The South. :laugh:

Being a Yankee (and single, did I mention?) , I'm enthralled by Southern Belles. So I had to peer inside.

Along with recipes for Dolly Parton's Favorite Meatloaf (start with two mounds of ground beef? :rolleyes:) and House Tea ("The house wine of the South," says the book), the book includes such pearls of wisdom as, "If you can be ready to go in less than thirty minutes, you probably shouldn't be leaving the house at all!"

So I ask the fine ladies of eGullet: are any of y'all Grits Girls? And does a woman have to be from the South to be a grits girl?

There are two sides to every story and one side to a Möbius band.

borschtbelt.blogspot.com

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Born in Manhattan, now living below the M-D Line (not Mogen David, ya hear??), I have to laugh when I remember Fannie Flagg and some of the female writers who hailed from this region... they were true southern ladies and delightful ... :biggrin:

Why I joined eGullet is a line straight from Scarlett O'Hara: "As God is my witness, I'll nevah be hungry again!" ...

Ain't that the all time truth, shugah? :laugh::laugh:

Melissa Goodman aka "Gifted Gourmet"

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Grits here is actually an acronym for Girls Raised In The South.  :laugh:

And does a woman have to be from the South to be a grits girl?

I'd say I'm both a grits girl (mmm, grits) and a "GRIT" (born and raised in North Cackalacky). You don't have to be from the south to be a grits (lowercase) girl, you just have to know how to whip up and enjoy a proper pot of grits...with cheese and shrimp would be even better. To be a "GRIT", you need to be able to make a pitcher of sweet tea in your sleep.

(I didn't even know I had an accent til I moved to DC...)

Amanda

Metrocurean, a D.C. restaurant and food blog

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The White Dog Cafe here in Philly where I was formerly employed, used to serve a Cheese Grits with Shrimp for brunch that was positively transcendant. Heartstoppingly good. In the literal sense! I don't know if it's still on the menu, but it's worth a special trip if it is.

Katie M. Loeb
Booze Muse, Spiritual Advisor

Author: Shake, Stir, Pour:Fresh Homegrown Cocktails

Cheers!
Bartendrix,Intoxicologist, Beverage Consultant, Philadelphia, PA
Captain Liberty of the Good Varietals, Aphrodite of Alcohol

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Well, I own a GRITS hat (and call all baseball-style hats "gimme hats"). I have a cast-iron skillet so well seasoned it's glossy black, and trained my husband and son to Never Touch The Cast Iron. The first thing I planted when I moved into a new house was mint, for my juleps. I have two kinds of country ham in my refrigerator at this very moment. I have two deviled egg plates. And I can make collards so good, even my collard-hating spouse likes them.

On the other hand: I can't handle the Sweet Potato Queens, I never harbored a secret desire to be a cheerleader, and I developed a severe allergy to sorority mixers in college.

I was born in Georgia and raised in North Carolina (North Cakalacky, as we like to call it), but I lived in South Florida long enough to be able to imitate Northern accents.

Put it all together and I suppose that qualifies me to only be a Cracked Belle.

Kathleen Purvis, food editor, The Charlotte (NC) Observer

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Well, I would have to say that a GRITS girl understands and takes to heart the phrase "Pretty is as pretty does" (and it was probably beaten into her lil head)!

Manners matter. A lot. Be nice to everybody and make everyone feel comfortable.

Never go out of the house looking like you just got out of bed. I swear, I am physically incapable of going anywhere, even to run Saturday errands without my hair and make-up done. It is kind of sad in a way, but extremely uncomfortable to be without it. Just yesterday, in the shopping center parking lot, I saw a little old lady with stiff sprayed red hair fixing her lipstick in the rear view mirror before she went into Wal-Mart. :biggrin: Well, I guess it is to be expected, the way I was raised.

Even as a teenager, my mother would not let me out of the House to go to the BEACH without curling my hair and applying makup. She would just say "at least you will look nice when you get there!"

I am not sure if the hair/make-up/dress thing is for all of the South, but I would assume it is and it most certainly is true for Texas.

I guess that makes me a GRITS girl! :wacko:

If you can't act fit to eat like folks, you can just set here and eat in the kitchen - Calpurnia

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I'll play! As an Asian-American,  born & raised and currently visiting Washington, DC, I'm a GRITS girl!

Are those beef sausages in that photo?

Sausage, schmausage...

I was eyeballing the sunnyside-down eggs 'n grits! Mighty fine eatin'!

There are two sides to every story and one side to a Möbius band.

borschtbelt.blogspot.com

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Even though I have been admonished by some people that Kentucky is not truly part of the south, (didn't join the Confederacy), there are a great many people who occupy that state who would bristle at that statement. Most certainly have a "southern" mindset.

And that goes for grits too.

I was born at home (hospitals were for "sick" people) followed by a gathering of the family so I could be introduced to the clan. Had a double first name all during my childhood to the side of the family native to Kentucky, had white gloves and Mary Janes to wear to church, and had it drummed into my head that "pretty is as pretty does."

I know 99 different ways to prepare grits and a different recipe for every kind of gravy known in the south from red eye to cream that is thick enough to mound on top of a chicken-fried steak.

Oh yes, I was a cheerleader in high school, but only after I moved to Wisconsin :biggrin:

"There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty. The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass!" Terry Pratchett

 

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I'll play! As an Asian-American,  born & raised and currently visiting Washington, DC, I'm a GRITS girl!

Are those beef sausages in that photo?

Sausage, schmausage...

I was eyeballing the sunnyside-down eggs 'n grits! Mighty fine eatin'!

Turkey schmausage with those over easy eggs :raz: Not photographed were some homemade buttermilk biscuits smothered in sawmill gobble gravy -- darn tootin'!

Yetty CintaS

I am spaghetttti

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Well, I have to take an opposition to that southern belle nonsense. Who cares how long it takes me to get ready. But then again, I grew up in the north with southern family.

But more importantly, I love grits (along with aspic, cast iron, country ham, collards, cornbread dressing, pralines, etc.), and have them often for breakfast. With butter.

Cheese grits are great too, and you can sub them for polenta to serve with mushrooms.

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Well, I would have to say that a GRITS girl understands and takes to heart the phrase "Pretty is as pretty does" (and it was probably beaten into her lil head)!

Manners matter.  A lot.  Be nice to everybody and  make everyone feel comfortable. 

Never go out of the house looking like you just got out of bed.  I swear, I am physically incapable of going anywhere, even to run Saturday errands without my hair and make-up done.  It is kind of sad in a way, but extremely uncomfortable to be without it.  Just yesterday, in the shopping center parking lot, I saw a little old lady with stiff sprayed red hair fixing her lipstick in the rear view mirror before she went into Wal-Mart.  :biggrin:  Well, I guess it is to be expected, the way I was raised...

I am not sure if the hair/make-up/dress thing is for all of the South, but I would assume it is and it most certainly is true for Texas. 

I guess that makes me a GRITS girl! :wacko:

I know a woman who won't bite into a doughnut because this would smear her lipstick. :shock: So she tears of pieces of the doughnut & pops them into her mouth.

Having said that, I'll state flatly that I adore glamorous, beautifully made-up women. :wub: Maybe I should high-tail it to Texas.

There are two sides to every story and one side to a Möbius band.

borschtbelt.blogspot.com

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  • 4 weeks later...

My mother was APALLED when she picked me up at the airport for my first Christmas break from college (I went to college in Virginia) carrying the same ink-stained backpack that I used for my books and wearing a beat-up Timex watch with a broken face that I wore because I was a theater major and went through watches in the scene shop like candy. If I remember correctly, I was also wearing Doc Martens (it was the 80's) and ripped jeans.

A few weeks later, I opened up my presents and got a Movado watch, a very conservative navy blue Coach handbag, and a stern lecture on how being 18 and attending a liberal arts school was no excuse for slovenliness. I've carried that lecture throughout life, but I still reserve the right to wear sweats and a baseball cap when shopping on a Saturday afternoon. And I'm not unsure that I don't still have that backpack in my attic closet along with 15 years of bridesmaid dresses.

As for grits, plain and swimming in butter and salt for breakfast, and served with tomato gravy for dinner (usually fried fish dinner). I LOVE grits and tomato gravy!

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  • 1 month later...
My mother was APALLED when she picked me up at the airport for my first Christmas break from college (I went to college in Virginia) carrying the same ink-stained backpack that I used for my books and wearing a beat-up Timex watch with a broken face that I wore because I was a theater major and went through watches in the scene shop like candy. If I remember correctly, I was also wearing Doc Martens (it was the 80's) and ripped jeans.

A few weeks later, I opened up my presents and got a Movado watch, a very conservative navy blue Coach handbag, and a stern lecture on how being 18 and attending a liberal arts school was no excuse for slovenliness. I've carried that lecture throughout life, but I still reserve the right to wear sweats and a baseball cap when shopping on a Saturday afternoon. And I'm not unsure that I don't still have that backpack in my attic closet along with 15 years of bridesmaid dresses.

As for grits, plain and swimming in butter and salt for breakfast, and served with tomato gravy for dinner (usually fried fish dinner). I LOVE grits and tomato gravy!

takomabaker - our mothers must be cut from the same cloth! I can almost hear the lecture!

Just like the English have the reputation for using cups of tea as a panacea, my mother had her favorite - lipstick. I could be lying prostrate in bed after a week of the flu, or perhaps catching my breath after a delivery and she would say "you know, you would feel better if you would put a little lipstick on." :shock:

I too, reserve the right to go in what I call "hag mode" on a weekend day if I am not going out, but if my mother calls to tell me she is stopping by, I am up at the vanity in no time to spare the disapproving looks or queries into my state of health!

I think I have shown remarkable restraint with my teenaged daughter so as not to pass this on to her. I have slips at time, but we agreed the one thing I can nag her about is the state of the eyebrows. I am sorry, but I can't help myself.

Edited by Lone Star (log)

If you can't act fit to eat like folks, you can just set here and eat in the kitchen - Calpurnia

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That's why Southern women are so neurotic. I've been dating a New Yorker for five years who cannot understand why I can't leave the house without makeup. And I hate to admit it, but I have been trained from childhood to have a good bathrobe by my bed at night so in case of emergency I won't have to run out into the street in something embarrassing. It's terrible.

My college roomate (from Snow Hill, North Carolina) used to quote the Steel Magnolias line, "The only thing that separates us from the animals is our ability to accessorize." (I may have butchered that line. I haven't watched the movie or seen my old roomate in years.)

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  • 1 month later...
Just like the English have the reputation for using cups of tea as a panacea, my mother had her favorite - lipstick.  I could be lying prostrate in bed after a week of the flu, or perhaps catching my breath after a delivery and she would say "you know, you would feel better if you would put a little lipstick on." :shock:

Women who wear lipstick just make me quiver.

After one eGullet dinner, Girlie Girl opened her purse and started reapplying her lipstick. I turned and stared at her slack-jawed, finally blurting out, "Do I get a big kiss?"

She then turned and gave me a big smooch on the lips. :wub:

Alas, that fizzled after a few months of dating, but I'm still transfixed by women who put lipstick on after a meal.

There are two sides to every story and one side to a Möbius band.

borschtbelt.blogspot.com

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Shrimp grits, please, swimming in butter with a little Maytag stirred in. After all that shameless eating, a girl's lips could be bare.

Last Christmas my impossibly glamorous mother gave me an improbably glamorous (bejewlled, paveed) compact for Christmas, and admitted she's bought the twin for herself. We then indulged in some mother/daughter girltalk about those Bette Davis/Rita Hayworth movies where our girl snaps open her compact at a restaurant, powders her nose, freshens her lipstickand snaps a fag into her cigarette holder. Through the blue smoke, Tyrone Power or Louis Jourdain is putty in her elbow-length gloved hands.

Margaret McArthur

"Take it easy, but take it."

Studs Terkel

1912-2008

A sensational tennis blog from freakyfrites

margaretmcarthur.com

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  • 11 months later...

I wanna bring this thread back up especially for Chufi, over on the dinner thread. She's in Amsterdam, but her picture of a fried drumstick, properly marinated in buttermilk, Tabasco, etc., then cooked to the perfect golden-brown, perfect shattery crust, is worthy of any Below-the-MD-cook in possession of her Mammaw's black skillet and a leftover cotillion corsage.

G.R.I.T.S. Girls are of a Southern State of MIND, not geography. They are be-mannered at birth, born to be gracious, social, tolerant of others' foibles, and just a tad bit short-tempered with foolishness and unkindness. They may be young or old, hair ranging from whalespout wisps to blue once-a-week helmets sprayed into submission at their Standing Appointment. They almost all own pearls, gloves, compacts, and several sturdy purses; hats are optional, though the G.R.I.T.S set probably own as many feathery sweeps and veiled toques as the Royal Families of Europe, and wear them with more panache, as well.

They can take their French manicures straight home from the salon and plunge right into that bowl of buttermilk chicken, flour it up and fling it in that skillet beside the pot of collards as well as they can sashay their satin-clad selves into a country club, the opera house or the White House. Dirt under those fancy nails just means they've been in the tomato patch or the rosebed or the horsestall, but they clean up REALLY well.

They have a zest for life, for literature, for Family and Friends; both are legion and necessary. Countless generations are remembered and celebrated; Grandma's necklace is a lovely accent to Granddaughter's wedding dress, and the tiniest new member of the clan is welcomed with her own add-a-pearl and a whispered word of womanly wisdom in her tiny ear. The littlest ones know to say, "Yes, Ma'am" and keep their skirts down and their knees together on their trikes...they aspire to be cheerleaders and doctors, mothers and teachers, writers and world-fixers, and usually achieve any and all of those, and much more.

Martinis and Mystery, Gloves and Lawnmowers, Satin and Skillets---all are part of a G.R.I.T.S. Girl's makeup, along with good manners, kitchen knowledge, love of animals and the outdoors, luxurious perfume and scandalous underwear and perhaps a good knock of bourbon on occasion.

It's a soothing, sizzling Sisterhood, and place is no deterrent to membership. It's all in the outlook.

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My name is Jason Perlow, I'm a Jewish boy from New York, and I -LOVE- grits girls. If interested, please email me at BIGSUTHERNLUVIN235@AOL.COM.

Jason Perlow, Co-Founder eGullet Society for Culinary Arts & Letters

Foodies who Review South Florida (Facebook) | offthebroiler.com - Food Blog (archived) | View my food photos on Instagram

Twittter: @jperlow | Mastodon @jperlow@journa.host

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Being a GRITS girl myself with the t-shirt to prove it - my husband from California has had to endure salt pork in the freezer (for collards); searching hopelessly for Texas Petes in Sacramento (because we'd run out of our home-made pepper vinegar – and also for collards), and getting mail order grits, corn meal and corn flour from South Carolina. I think my mother thinks I became much too casual on moving to California where they wear jeans for "everything." But as I gotten older I've learned there's a certain gentility to folks who have a Southern-side - manners, cooking, welcoming - an aura of "down-home." A friend here who's from Tennessee has a bond where we talk in Southernisms - "she's good people" and we know instantly what that means - GRITS girls know what it means to be that to - regardless of where you live.

Live and learn. Die and get food. That's the Southern way.

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I wanna bring this thread back up especially for Chufi, over on the dinner thread.  She's in Amsterdam, but her picture of a fried drumstick, properly marinated in buttermilk, Tabasco, etc., then cooked to the perfect golden-brown, perfect shattery crust, is worthy of any Below-the-MD-cook in possession of her Mammaw's black skillet and a leftover cotillion corsage.

G.R.I.T.S. Girls are of a Southern State of MIND, not geography.  They are be-mannered at birth, born to be gracious, social, tolerant of others' foibles, and just a tad bit short-tempered with foolishness and unkindness.    They may be young or old, hair ranging from whalespout wisps to blue once-a-week helmets sprayed into submission at their Standing Appointment.  They almost all own pearls, gloves, compacts, and several sturdy purses; hats are optional, though the G.R.I.T.S set probably own as many feathery sweeps and veiled toques as the Royal Families of Europe, and wear them with more panache, as well.

They can take their French manicures straight home from the salon and plunge right into that bowl of buttermilk chicken, flour it up and fling it in that skillet beside the pot of collards as well as they can sashay their satin-clad selves into a country club, the opera house or the White House.  Dirt under those fancy nails just means they've been in the tomato patch or the rosebed or the horsestall, but they clean up REALLY well.

They have a zest for life, for literature, for Family and Friends; both are legion and necessary.  Countless generations are remembered and celebrated; Grandma's necklace is a lovely accent to Granddaughter's wedding dress, and the tiniest new member of the clan is welcomed with her own add-a-pearl and a whispered word of womanly wisdom in her tiny ear.  The littlest ones know to say, "Yes, Ma'am" and keep their skirts down and their knees together on their trikes...they aspire to be cheerleaders and doctors, mothers and teachers, writers and world-fixers, and usually achieve any and all of those, and much more.

Martinis and Mystery, Gloves and Lawnmowers, Satin and Skillets---all are part of a G.R.I.T.S. Girl's makeup, along with good manners, kitchen knowledge, love of animals and the outdoors, luxurious perfume and scandalous underwear and perhaps a good knock of bourbon on occasion.

It's a soothing, sizzling Sisterhood, and place is no deterrent to membership.  It's all in the outlook.

Well said, Sugar. And for the post on manners - that is what we learn at birth. "A woman with lovely manners can go everywhere", was my mama's mantra. When we speak it all sounds sweet, even if we are not meaning to be sweet.

We are tough, but look soft. We smell delicious, but can organize circles around men. We can pop a cake in the oven one moment and tend to a child's cut knee the next.

Patti Davis

www.anatomyofadinnerparty.com

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