Grits
SIX years ago this spring I ordered a fish for its side dish in a restaurant in Charleston, S.C., and I have not been the same since. What was described simply as "creamy grits" on the menu was beyond a revelation. These were golden, slightly nubbly and vibrant with corn flavor. Creamy was beside the point.
Back then, about the only way to have that transporting experience was at the source, deep in the South where grits originated. The rest of America was mostly sentenced to supermarket grits, white and smooth and as gutsy as Cream of Wheat. Even if you bought the "old-fashioned" kind from Quaker, the best you could hope for was one step better than gruel.
Now real grits are easily available, in stores and online, and the only wonder is why chefs are not making more of them. Mix grits with buttery leeks and shiitakes and you will never settle for mashed potatoes again. Serve them with duck or shrimp or sausage and you may give up rice. Real grits have such distinctive flavor you can only marvel at how many nuances a single ingredient can have: a little like popcorn, a little like roasted corn on the cob, a bit sweet like corn pudding.
Grits have cachet. They have character. Essentially, they are the William Hurt of starches: Give them a supporting role and they will steal the show.
As with so many other improvements in ingredients lately, whether artisanal cheese or heritage turkeys, the grits upgrade actually represents a step backward. Producers who have revived or stuck to the old way of growing corn, drying it and grinding it to bits, are now marketing a time-honored product that suddenly tastes completely new.
Refinement was just not good to grits. One of the greatest concepts in American cooking has been milled away over the last half a century, to the point that most people hear the word and can only think of diner porridge. But real grits are more like sand and gravel than powder and dust when raw; they need serious cooking, and when they are done they are still almost chewy, in the best way. They are also more nutritious because they have not been processed to instant pabulum.
Glenn Roberts, who founded Anson Mills in South Carolina in 1998, refers to them as antebellum grits, meaning the extremely coarse kind that were routinely produced until the end of World War II. They have a sweeter flavor from the corn, which he notes starts with "high mineral, floral notes." The finer the dried kernels are ground, the more flavor they lose along with the texture that should define them.
