Grits? Gaack!

[Fresser]

After the Hee Haw Truck Stop Recipes, grits surely represent the South's finest contribution to American cuisine. Shockingly, however, some Northern folk would wrestle an alligator than try a bowl of grits or another Southern dish.

Once I worked up the nerve to offer my sister a bowl of my famous (around here, anyway) cheddar cheese grits. "Grits?" she scowled. "I'm not from the South!" was her indignant reply. You would have thought I was trying to poison her or something. Sure, I could have argued that grits are actually made from corn, a grain that typically is grown NORTH of the Mason-Dixon Line, but I didn't bother.

Another time, some college friends told of their drive back to Chicago from their spring break road-trip to Florida. Weary from driving and in need of repast, this group of intrepid noshers stopped at a Georgia diner to order eggs for breakfast. Their waitress cheerily chirped, "Would y'all like some grits with that?" To which an ordinarily polite New Yorker smirked, "Grits??? Do you have any POTATOES?"

I don't think the waitress conked him on the side of his head with a cast-iron skillet, but she surely should have. Teach that damn Yankee some manners, I say.

So how did I, a hardly well-traveled Fresser, acquire my taste for grits? My chum Puddin' Buns always drilled into me that when you travel to another part of the country or world, you eat what the residents eat. Try it--maybe you'll find something new. So when we visited his cousin at Washington University in St. Louis, we dropped in at a Waffle House and decided to try some grits with our eggs.

Instantly we were smitten. Here was an alternative to the hash brown hegemony so common in Yankee slop-houses, and really: shouldn't we just save the potatoes for dinner? Given that we were new to Southern cooking, Puddin' Buns and I topped our grits with (shudder) maple syrup--a capital offense in Mississippi, I later learned--but I have since mended my ways and stick to sharp cheddar and a splash of cayenne pepper sauce atop my bowl o' Southern heaven.

I can just imagine the reactions some of y'all have endured when trying to introduce the novitiate to the glory that is Southern cooking. So sit down with some cornbread and tell us your stories.

[woodburner]

Don't even mention the word "*rits" in my hood.

Save the gas money, and keep all that booshit, well below the Mason Dixsom line.

There, I said it.

woodburner

[Jason Perlow]

It's amazing how quickly you can get people to eat grits if you call it Polenta, especially served with some nice seafood or a peice of meat on top.

This is a "New Orleans-style" shrimp and grits I made a while back:

I mean, call it Creole Shrimp with Buttery Polenta and nobody would even blink.

[andiesenji]

Have you ever seen the movie "My Cousin Vinny?"

When I first saw it I broke out laughing when they were in the cafe for breakfast. One other person in the theater was also laughing and I turned around and waved. When I walked out into the lobby, he came up to me and asked if I was from the south. I admitted that I was born and raised in Kentucky and he shook hands and reported that he was from West Virginia. My friend (from Wisconsin) and his wife (California native) simply did not get the joke. They thought the scene was funny but didn't get the joke about the grits.

Later, in the courtroom scene, Vinny uses the way grits are cooked to make an important point.

[jgm]

I really don't have any grits stories, but I really love them. With butter and freshly ground black pepper. Even if I didn't love them so much, it would be a great excuse to eat butter.

[annecros]

I've never understood why people from the north so eagerly embrace a bowl of cream of wheat, but turn up their noses at grits! I eat and enjoy both, but on a plate with some scrambled eggs and a ham steak, I want my grits. REAL grits too. Not those dehydrated instant things that some restaurants attempt to pass off.

Yep, polenta is Italian for grits. I love the way that some southern cuisine is not recognized for the character, nutrional value, and international heritage that it is entitled to, unless it is presented by someone not from the south.

Collards and Kale are kissing cousins. In fact, when I first moved to South Florida and had difficulty in finding fresh mustard greens to cut my turnip greens, I substituted Kale, and it really is a very good combo. It staved off my craving for turnips and mustard, anyway.

And why in the world do the supermarkets insist on cutting those lovely greens off the top of the turnips? What are they doing, throwing them away? Such a waste of a tasty and nutritious food.

[andiesenji]

I've never understood why people from the north so eagerly embrace a bowl of cream of wheat, but turn up their noses at grits! I eat and enjoy both, but on a plate with some scrambled eggs and a ham steak, I want my grits. REAL grits too. Not those dehydrated instant things that some restaurants attempt to pass off.

Yep, polenta is Italian for grits. I love the way that some southern cuisine is not recognized for the character, nutrional value, and international heritage that it is entitled to, unless it is presented by someone not from the south.

Collards and Kale are kissing cousins. In fact, when I first moved to South Florida and had difficulty in finding fresh mustard greens to cut my turnip greens, I substituted Kale, and it really is a very good combo. It staved off my craving for turnips and mustard, anyway.

And why in the world do the supermarkets insist on cutting those lovely greens off the top of the turnips? What are they doing, throwing them away? Such a waste of a tasty and nutritious food.

←

I agree. I buy most of my vegetables at a local produce market where they leave the tops on everything. They know that if we don't use the tops ourselves, most of us have animals or neighbors who have animals that enjoy them. In fact, many of the markets, do trim the tops and sell them packed in big boxes to people who keep animals of one kind or another. I see one of the people who live on the road east of me loading stuff in their truck from the loading dock at the market. They have pygmy goats, a pot-bellied pig and an alpaca. (A really mean alpaca, he has gotten loose a few times and chased dogs and people - looks cute but bites and spits.)

I grow my own mustard, mostly for the seed but when the plants are young, I pull off the basal leaves at the bottom of the plant but just until the stalks begin shooting up. After that the leaves have very little flavor, it all goes into seed production. However, if I keep cutting the seed stalk back, it will keep producing tasty leaves.

I like to toast a teaspoon or two of the seeds, and toss them in with the greens. very tasty.

I suppose to some people polenta sounds more sophisticated. During WWII we had some Italian POWs working on the farm and one of them said he like the polenta. Our cook was furious and stomped around in the kitchen muttering that she wasn't going to put up with someone calling her good grits by some "furrin" name!

[bergerka]

Ok, I'm from the southwest, not the south, but what could possibly be bad about grits? I mean, grits are good!

K

[annecros]

It is interesting. Polenta is just making do with what you had plenty of, just like grits are. Ground, dried corn is easy to store and keep, nutritious, and very tasty when you make a "porridge" out of it. Water, salt, fat and seasoning.

I do know that collards kept many a family fed over the winter during the depression era, and before. My mother remembers a family that lost the farm, and they took the collards up from the garden, loaded them on a wagon, and took them to transplant wherever they were going. After looking up the nutrional value, I can see why. A pot of those greens, with some fat from the preserved pork, and cornbread on the side, you can put in a good days work with plenty of fuel. Add the artistry of the southern cook, and it is a pleasure to eat on top of it all!

I have a treasure in a letter my grandmother wrote to my father during WWII. She told him that the summer vegetables were in, and that she hoped that he would get home to visit in time to enjoy them. To this day, I think my favorite meal is the "vegetable" meal that many southerners would recognize. Creamed corn, peas, butter beans, sliced tomatoes, cucumber salad, sometimes some boiled okra (boiled with either the peas or butter beans), sometimes some smothered crookneck squash, served with fried streak of lean. Oh, yeah, and a plate of crispy hoecakes. The meat was very much a condiment. This meal says warm weather in the south to me. My stepdaughter requests it specifically on her birthday every year. It is a chore to cook, and I cook all day for her birthday dinner, but back in the day - it was just what was around, being canned and preserved at the time, and easy to put out a real spread while you were preserving the bounty.

Wow, now I'm hungry!

[joiei]

cook up those grits with some heavy cream and some mushrooms, yummm. At breakfast, straight up with bacon and a fried egg, nothing better, especially if you have some extra butter to let melt on top. And instant grits are a total abomination. Who ever thought that product up should be taken out back of the woodshed and given a talking to. Now I can think of a few northern dishes I have tried and wondered to myself, what the heck to they eat this for, yuk.

[mrbigjas]

i will honestly never understand this reaction to most food, and especially something like grits. i mean, if someone tries to give you chitlins, and you are disgusted by the fact that it's an intestine, i kind of understand that. but grits? it's just corn. what's the big deal? and okra, which people also have this visceral reaction to. it's just a vegetable. if you don't like it, that's fine, but people are always all OHMAHGAH NOT GRITS OR OKRA THAT'S SO VOMITOUS OHMAHGAH OHMAHGAH and fanning themselves frantically whenever anyone mentions them. good lord. it's just grits. or okra. or beets. or whatever. vegetables are morality-neutral. they're not evil.

[annecros]

HAHA, agreed. Vegetables know no boundaries or borders. I have converted a couple of okra haters in my day. They were skeptical, but are now converts. Most amazing is my German husband! He turned up his nose at that "slimy" stuff, until he tried it fresh and properly prepared in a pot of butter beans. Then I pickled some, and he went nuts! I have to keep a cold pack in the fridge for him, available whenever he gets the urge.

I have to admit though, my proudest moment was when I taught my stepdaughter how to appreciate a rhutabaga, and now she eats the leftovers for breakfast if she hasn't had them in a while! That's another root vegetable that produces very tasty, tender greens, that get lopped off!

Hubby turned me on to Kohlrabbi (sp?). I like it very much. I can eat bowls and bowls of it in a cream sauce. I don't care for the greens there, though. Too delicate to hold up. But the root is fantastic.

Breaks my heart that the big pot of field peas and snaps, that I used to ladle over my cornbread and eat for dessert (yep, dessert, as a child), is called "cowpeas" up north and fed to livestock from what I understand. One favorite after school snack was warmed over greens, in a sandwich of cornbread.

Yep, grits are good food. And there is a lot of good food in the world!

[Timh]

I would venture that those who "tried" grits and didn't like them only had tried the shitty diner versions, instant worn out institutional versions. (ketchup as a vegetabel type)

[Daniel]

That looks great Jason.. I am in the middle of making the Inn at Little Washingtons version of shrimp and grits for tomorrow night... So far I have roasted a pan of shallots and cored 24 roma tomatoes and filled with a leaf of basil.. I am wondering where the hell this is going..

[joiei]

I would venture that those who "tried" grits and didn't like them only had tried the shitty diner versions, instant worn out institutional versions. (ketchup as a vegetabel type)

←

You got that right.

[Lan4Dawg]

It is interesting. Polenta is just making do with what you had plenty of, just like grits are. Ground, dried corn is easy to store and keep, nutritious, and very tasty when you make a "porridge" out of it. Water, salt, fat and seasoning.

I do know that collards kept many a family fed over the winter during the depression era, and before. My mother remembers a family that lost the farm, and they took the collards up from the garden, loaded them on a wagon, and took them to transplant wherever they were going. After looking up the nutrional value, I can see why. A pot of those greens, with some fat from the preserved pork, and cornbread on the side, you can put in a good days work with plenty of fuel. Add the artistry of the southern cook, and it is a pleasure to eat on top of it all!

I have a treasure in a letter my grandmother wrote to my father during WWII. She told him that the summer vegetables were in, and that she hoped that he would get home to visit in time to enjoy them. To this day, I think my favorite meal is the "vegetable" meal that many southerners would recognize. Creamed corn, peas, butter beans, sliced tomatoes, cucumber salad, sometimes some boiled okra (boiled with either the peas or butter beans), sometimes some smothered crookneck squash,  served with fried streak of lean. Oh, yeah, and a plate of crispy hoecakes. The meat was very much a condiment. This meal says warm weather in the south to me. My stepdaughter requests it specifically on her birthday every year. It is a chore to cook, and I cook all day for her birthday dinner, but back in the day - it was just what was around, being canned and preserved at the time, and easy to put out a real spread while you were preserving the bounty.

Wow, now I'm hungry! 

←

I want to be invited to your house for your step-daughter's birth day. ":^)

All of those vegetables remind me of camp meeting/all-day-preaching-and-dinner-on-the-grounds where you would find on the table all manner of vegetabes known to man and a few that I swan were "known but to God".

I wish I could remember the chef who pointed out that grits, like the starch of any other region--be it rice, potatoes, pasta, or what ever, were simply a means of getting salt and dairy in to one's mouth; grits just happened to be Southern and there fore were mis-understood.

[Maison Rustique]

Well, don't forget that it's "mush" in the mid-west. We loved mush fried nice and crispy when growing up in KCMO.

[Adrienne Carmack]

I moved directly from Texas to Boston for college, and had never lived anywhere else so was always surprised when I realized something I thought was common knowledge (or common language) wasn't. I worked with others who loved to cook, so one day I came in and proudly exclaimed that I had made my first chicken fried steak since I'd moved away from home and that it had turned out quite good.

When I described the recipe, though, everyone at work kept asking me where the chicken was?

[azureus]

Once I worked up the nerve to offer my sister a bowl of my famous (around here, anyway) cheddar cheese grits.  "Grits?" she scowled.  "I'm not from the South!" was her indignant reply.  You would have thought I was trying to poison her or something.  Sure, I could have argued that grits are actually made from corn, a grain that typically is grown NORTH of the Mason-Dixon Line, but I didn't bother.

←

I've lived in the Midwest most of my life, and I think that we suffer from some sort of culinary insanity up here. I'm surrounded by millions of acres of corn and soybeans, and if I want grits, I have to go buy polenta imported from Oregon. Last summer, I was at a local art fair, where there was actually one food vendor selling roasted soybeans (soynuts). The next booth over was being run by the South Dakota Soybean Growers Association. They were selling doughnuts! They didn't think it was funny when I asked why they weren't promoting their own product.

Confession: I eat my grits with milk, honey and dried fruit for breakfast most mornings. I'm sure I'll be vilified by both Southerners and Italians.

April

[joiei]

Once I worked up the nerve to offer my sister a bowl of my famous (around here, anyway) cheddar cheese grits.  "Grits?" she scowled.  "I'm not from the South!" was her indignant reply.  You would have thought I was trying to poison her or something.   Sure, I could have argued that grits are actually made from corn, a grain that typically is grown NORTH of the Mason-Dixon Line, but I didn't bother.

←

I've lived in the Midwest most of my life, and I think that we suffer from some sort of culinary insanity up here. I'm surrounded by millions of acres of corn and soybeans, and if I want grits, I have to go buy polenta imported from Oregon. Last summer, I was at a local art fair, where there was actually one food vendor selling roasted soybeans (soynuts). The next booth over was being run by the South Dakota Soybean Growers Association. They were selling doughnuts! They didn't think it was funny when I asked why they weren't promoting their own product.

Confession: I eat my grits with milk, honey and dried fruit for breakfast most mornings. I'm sure I'll be vilified by both Southerners and Italians.

April

←

Actually April, that sounds like it could be breakfast. That is pretty much what I put in my oatmeal, why not grits?

[Adrienne Carmack]

Once I worked up the nerve to offer my sister a bowl of my famous (around here, anyway) cheddar cheese grits.  "Grits?" she scowled.  "I'm not from the South!" was her indignant reply.  You would have thought I was trying to poison her or something.   Sure, I could have argued that grits are actually made from corn, a grain that typically is grown NORTH of the Mason-Dixon Line, but I didn't bother.

←

Confession: I eat my grits with milk, honey and dried fruit for breakfast most mornings. I'm sure I'll be vilified by both Southerners and Italians.

April

←

I eat mine with butter and sugar. Never did like cheese grits... But I do like them with a little bacon (if I'm not having the sweet version). Actually, I was taught to eat rice that way too. And tortillas (microwaved with butter and sugar). Yeah, I realize that is pretty gross. But it was good when I was a kid and the tortillas were the freshest thing in the fridge.

Actually, there's a nouvelle Southern restaurant, if you will, in Miami that serves a delicious appetizer of grits with shrimp and truffle oil. The only thing their menu is missing is fried okra...

[bandregg]

The fear of regional cuisine crosses the Mason-Dixon line going up, down, and sideways. I know plenty of northerners who had to be dragged into trying grits, and I also know plenty of southerners who had to be dragged into trying corned beef. Heck, I know a guy from Montana that had to be dragged into trying bagels (he wouldn't eat them because he couldn't abide "that California food", another story)! When we hae guests barring a real honest hatred or allergy I just make what I'm going to want to eat and people can go hungry if they won't at least try it.

[kpurvis]

I would venture that those who "tried" grits and didn't like them only had tried the shitty diner versions, instant worn out institutional versions. (ketchup as a vegetabel type)

←

I subscribe to the Cream of Wheat theory: Northerners see grits and think it's hot cereal, so they try to eat them plain. They don't know to mix their egg into them, or red-eye gravy, or fried ham.

It couldn't be that they don't have red-eye gravy or fried ham, right?

Of course, I also speak as a reformed nongritist. I wouldn't touch them when I was a kid. Had to meet up with cheese grits in Tallahassee and shrimp & grits in the Carolinas before I began to learn the errors of my age.

[Fresser]

The fear of regional cuisine crosses the Mason-Dixon line going up, down, and sideways. I know plenty of northerners who had to be dragged into trying grits, and I also know plenty of southerners who had to be dragged into trying corned beef. Heck, I know a guy from Montana that had to be dragged into trying bagels (he wouldn't eat them because he couldn't abide "that California food", another story)!

←

I understand that in Texas, bagels are known as "Jewish doughnuts."

Edited December 5, 2005 by Fresser (log)

[Anna N]

I confess that I have never tried grits but it occurs to me that if Southeners really wanted us Northerners to try them, they would have given them a more appetizing name.