True Grits

My pal Wallis is cooking up a new venture. He’s a displaced southern boy living in man’s body in Michigan… and he yearns for the flavors of his youth. That yearning has benefits for the rest of us. Robby and I, for example, usually get a breakfast or two a year out of his valiant attempts at recreating the perfect southern brunch… These magical meals bring about platters of thick bacon, flaky biscuits, savory sausagey gravy, perfectly fried eggs (it is the only time I’ve ever seen Robby dig into fried eggs. He shuns them everywhere else in life– but there, at Wallis’ table, he tucks into them as though they are his favorite food…)– and always, always, there are grits.

I love grits. I came to them via my parents and grandparents– all of us bonifide northern-midwesterners. My mother’s father called them mush and I couldn’t ever decide which I liked better– the first morning’s version with yellow pools of butter and great lashings of maple syrup– or the second morning’s version where the left overs were fried into cakes with crispy edges.

My parents were big on grits, too. Years ago, before The Cracker Barrel restaurants made it this far north, my father would announce, late on a Friday night, “Let’s drive to Kentucky for breakfast”– and we would. Kentucky, being a border state, didn’t shudder at my request for maple syrup. And TCB had enchantingly tiny glass bottles of maple syrup that made it all the more fun…

For years I ate my grits with maple syrup. The same way I ate my Cream of Wheat and Cream of Rice. My mother rotated the Quaker Quick grits with the aforementioned cereals on winter mornings. The bowls, if left unrinsed, would have a ring of steely grit to them.

And then, in college, I met Wallis. And his utter horror that I would slander his good grits with syrup nearly undone any good I’d managed to do with words in our poetry class. I learned to butter and salt my grits. Pepper them even. And ate them this way ever after.

I don’t make grits often. I relish the servings that I get at Wally’s table and the bowls of cheesy grit goodness that our Georgian Uncle Pope makes when we visit. I have, in my fridge door, a tin of really good grits– the kind they use at Zingermans and very, very rarely, I’ll go to the trouble of making them myself but I usually end up with a scorched pan.

Last week we had a grits feast courtesy of Wallis. We did an un-blind taste test with several different varieties. Most of them impressive in their pettigree. Words like stone ground, organic, milled were thrown about while we sniffed and poked and tasted. Really, it was almost as obnoxious as those wine snobs you encounter occasionally. Each of us straining to detect and pronounce the nuance of each speciman.

The results were hilarious. We all liked one variety with almost identical scores. We pronounced the winning grits to be “creamy” and “consistent”… and yet those were the 5-minute Quick ones.

For me, this makes sense. I grew up on the Quick varieties. It’s all that was available above the Mason/Dixon in the 1970s.. but it was funny to see the shocked look on the face of my southern pal Christy– it didn’t seem right to her or me.

On the other flavors we were divided. I learned that I am not a good focus group panelist. I get swayed by worrying out that I will offend the person next or across me if I disagree with their answer. And I second guess myself. I also should have scored my grits based on how I would actually eat them– with butter and salt– and not how they are “naked.” This is why I always score terribly on standardized tests. In all earnesty I start to feel bad for the wrong answers and figure out a way to justify using them. (And yet I don’t have this same level of empathy for, say, some of my boneheaded coworkers…)

By the fourth bowl of grits I was sick wondering whether or not I would like the last one or this one better with bacon or eggs or toast or on the side of a really good steak… Again. Put me on the packaging panel. Or the marketing brainstorming– where I can’t do damage. (By the way– I think “True Grits” would make a really good name. But that’s just me.)

We had, in the end, a marvelous time– as we always do at Wally’s table. Katie’s pots of tea and Wally’s pans of grits combined in our bellies to leave us sated and fat and sloshy. And happy.

Regardless of the grits you choose– make sure they have the proper accompaniments– excellent company and a great deal of laughter. It’s the only real way to enjoy them.