Grits Ain't Groceries?

"If I don't love you, baby, grits ain't groceries, eggs ain't poultry, and Mona Lisa was a man." - Little Milton

Basic Buttered Grits

Grits are regarded by some people, particularly furriners and damyankees, as the national food of the Occupied Confederate States. While plenty of us will stand up and be counted for peas and okra, butter beans, turnip greens, catfish, and cornbread, the fact is that grits probably are the quintessential southern dish. Try substituting "turnip greens" into Little Milton's immortal love ballad. It just doesn't work. You may serve grits with turnip greens, if you wish, although for grits and greens, collards are milder. My case rests.

Grits may be served with cheese, with fried eggs mushed up in them, with a spicy shrimp sauce, with white sausage gravy, red-eye gravy, the aforementioned greens, with just about anything you want to put in 'em, served as a porridge or a casserole or fried in cakes. Butter is an ideal additive. Butter, not hydrogenated vegetable oil butter, but butter. Ain't bad with bacon crumbled in, too. Only damyankees eat grits with sugar, though. Grits are not cream of wheat. Collards and cream of wheat ain't gonna happen.

So what are grits and why are they such a damned big deal?

Grits are -- or is, depending on your seventh grade grammar teacher -- a coarsely ground corn product. Grits aren't corn meal, though, and they certainly aren't polenta. (Do not believe The Food Hacks blog. The difference is not that polenta is made from yellow corn and grits from white corn.) The difference is chemical -- you can get yellow grits if you like the color -- but you can deceive yourself with Food Hacks' benighted damyankeeness and substitute polenta for grits if you want. Personally, I'd have to hunt for polenta, but I can guy grits at Dollar General.

Damn the hemicellulose! Shoulda Eaten Grits!

Grits are not mere corn meal mush. You want to experience pellagra, just live on a diet of corn meal mush, easy peasy. Not even Corn Huskers Lotion is gonna fix what pellagra has done to that poor cracker's hands.

You see, the Vitamin B3 (niacin) in corn is bound to hemicellulose and can't be absorbed by the human gut. But centuries ago, prehistoric Mesoamerican chefs discovered that soaking corn in an alkaline solution (most likely wood ashes and water) softened the kernels and made the corn tastier and more nutritious. The product is called hominy, pronounced "harmony" by many Southerners. Of course, there were no Mesoamerican chemists to discover that the alkali broke down the hemicellulose (softening the kernels) and freed the B vitamins (making the hominy more nutritious than regular corn).

The chemical name for this process is nixtamalization, It's no accident that you see "tamal" in that word, either: dried nixtamalized corn can be coarsely ground into grits, or it can be more finely ground into the masa flour used for corn tortillas and tamales. (Cornmeal doesn't stick together into a "dough" the same way masa does. So cornmeal tortillas simply don't work, and Delta style cornmeal tamales are grainier textured than Mexican tamales.) But while both are groceries, grits ain't tamales

Which leads us back to grits...

Grits are cooked by boiling them in water, even if you plan to use them in a casserole (like grits and greens) or slice them cold and fry them (grits cakes). Preparation is fairly simple: one parts grits to four parts water, bring to boiling, reduce to simmer, and cook. I haven't tried cooking grits in an Instant Pot, but this isn't that kind of blog.

Regular grits take 30-40 minutes to cook, and the biggest chore is stirring so they don't stick and burn. "Quick" grits take about 5-7 minutes, and you don't have to stir so much.

"Instant" grits (just add boiling water or nuke in the microwave for 60 seconds) are an abomination. This would be in Leviticus had the ancient Hebrews cultivated maize and discovered nixtamalization. As far as I know, though, grits are kosher, unless of course you put bacon on them.

All this aside, G.R.I.T.S. also stands for Girls Raised In The South.