Food: A Treatise On Grits

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A Treatise On Grits
Monday, February 27, 2006

I am from the South...the Deep South. I grew up watching football, playing in the yard, and experiencing the joys of living in rural America. As an adult, I moved far, far away from rural America. I moved smack into the downtown area of one of the nation's 50 largest cities. That was, of course, after college at a liberal arts university and graduate school at a massive, anonymous public university. Then I lived the life of the urban dweller, shopping at outdoor markets and going to writers' groups. The one thing that stayed with me through all of those moves and lifestyle changes was grits. Yes, you read right. I said grits.

This Southern delicacy does not get its due elsewhere in the country, which I am convinced is because other people try to spruce their grits up, make them something they are not. This past Thanksgiving grits became a secret weapon for me. Against the hopes and dreams of my family, I married a Yankee. On his behalf, however, he is not your average Yankee. No, indeed, he is not. Instead he moved South for college. Like other men, he moved for warm weather but fell in love with the women. At any rate, it is lucky for me that my husband fell in love with most aspects of Southern culture, and that includes our food.

He eats grits. He loves them, so it is part of our staple diet. After 30 months in the north, I have yet to eat a bowl of oatmeal and doubt I ever will. Why would I eat oatmeal when I can stock up on real grits when I am home and smuggle them back with me?

At any rate, I have a sister-in-law who, shall we say, is not the best at parenting her little ones. They run around without any supervision, so my plan at Thanksgiving was to take grits to my in-laws' house. My in-laws rarely eat breakfast, so we end up going to the store or a restaurant, and inevitably, we end up with the sister-in-law's children. It is not that I want to starve children, but I get tired of taking care of other people. So my husband and I laughed maniacally as we cooked up a plan. We would bring extra-spicy sausage, which my mother-in-law swears is a "weird thing about Southerners," and grits. That way we would have breakfast, and anyone else would be welcome to join in.

Well, what do you know? My little nephews decided that they would try grits. They tried them and did not care for them, which secretly made me glad. It is an acquired taste, after all. Then my sister-in-law comes in and explains that in college, she ate grits. Woo-hoo, good for her, I am thinking. Then she explains that she could never eat them plain (which is the only way real grits come), but she adds sugar, butter, and milk. Okay, wait a minute. Stop.

Grits are not an experiment. You add salt and pepper and a pat of butter. Maybe you put cheese in them for the kids. You can crumble bacon or sausage or add in some scrambled eggs. You absolutely do not go around adding sugar and milk to your grits.

It was very hard for my husband to pry the container of grits from my hand because I knew that I was giving them over to be destroyed. "It will be okay," he whispered.

I tried to be calm but could not help myself. "Why would you do that?"

"It's one way to eat grits," my sister-in-law said back to me.

"Maybe for Yankees. It is not a way to eat grits for Southerners. Why would you want to ruin a delicious food?"

"They're good that way. I don't like them the other way."

I walked out of the kitchen to avoid explaining that grits, like other parts of our culture, belong to Southerners. We are different from the rest of the nation, in part because our past has isolated us. That means that we have the final say on such expert-required topics as grits eating. When I came back downstairs, my sister-in-law was eating her grits concoction. I just shook my head. Why ruin a delicacy?

By Julia Mercer

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