“I don’t get no respect” — Grits
They’re as warm as the rising sun, as hearty as opera, as healthy as a hug. Dab a bit of butter on top and you’re in morning paradise.
But grits get no respect.
Most Americans make faces when you mention this ancient breakfast food that’s long beloved in a region of the South known as the “grits belt”—southern Virginia to northern Florida and inland several hundred miles. South Carolina is the center of grits country, Charleston the capital, and it’s here that artisan entrepreneurs are grinding a new path for 21st century grits made from centuries-old corn varieties.
“If you don’t like grits, that’s because you’ve never had good grits cooked right,” avers Greg Johnsman, founder of Marsh Hen Mill on Edisto Island, an hour south of Charleston.
Johnsman offers white, yellow, blue and red grits from heirloom corn varieties produced on site, or grown for him by local farmers, and ground on three antique stone grits mills he has accumulated over the years. It’s been a labor of love, but success has followed: The mill store on Highway 174 draws dozens of visitors a day; online sales are strong; and Marsh Hen Mill grits appear on many menus in the region, such as the Charleston Chef Service private dining collaborative.
Anthropologists figure corn has been a staple food in Meso-America for 6,000 years, just as wheat has been in the Old World. Bred from an endemic grass, teosinte, in Central America, corn spread north among Native peoples as far as Montana, from Pacific to Atlantic. Shown this reliable provender by Carolina’s indigenous Muskogee people, it was quickly adopted by hardscrabble Low Country settlers from Europe who struggled to find prosperity in the swamplands of the coast, and has remained a low-glamour staple ever since.
“This is just down-home blue collar food,” Johnsman explains. “Easy to grow. Stores well for years. Easy to cook. Grits were not served in the plantation estate’s dining room on bone china. They were in the workers’ cottages. You can church it up with embellishments like cream and honey, but if you have good grits cooked well, a pat of butter will do. Go back a few generations around here and people truly could live off the land.”
Nor are grits just breakfast food. Visitors to South Carolina can hardly pick up a restaurant menu without encountering shrimp and grits, a savory, rich lunch or dinner dish that reflects the fact this is one of the few places left where locally-caught wild shrimp are still pretty common—and that once upon a time, hard as it may be to believe today, shrimp were also a blue-collar repast frowned on by upper-class chefs. Now that shrimp have been culturally upgraded, shrimp and grits bears a touch of upscale cachet.
Johnsman’s approach to his artisan business is almost evangelistic, with the sort of vivid flair and fervent belief one might find behind a pulpit. His varieties sport distinctive, colorful names such as Jimmy Red, Sea Island Blue, Guinea Flint and Unicorn—the latter such a rare variety that cultivar restoration began with just one last lone cob of seeds.
“A cadre of crazy characters filling the world with flavor one bag of stone-ground goodness at a time,” is the way he describes his business.
“We’re in the grits renaissance,” he tells me. “They’re cool. They’re in Michelin-star restaurants. Everybody’s catching on. I worked a while back with a chef from Sweden. Sweden!
“When I started out everyone thought I was crazy. Now I’m not quite as crazy as I used to be,” Johnsman says.
While an artisan food business may be so globally engaging in the 21st century that it reaches Scandinavia, evangelizing for grits is nothing new in the Low Country.
“An inexpensive, simple, and thoroughly digestible food, [grits] should be made popular throughout the world,” The Charleston News and Courier proclaimed in 1952. “Given enough of it, the inhabitants of planet Earth would have nothing to fight about. A man full of [grits] is a man of peace.”
A half dozen other mills across the Low Country also produce custom grits, but Johnsman is the leader with six types in several grinds, plus sidelines in red peas, Carolina rice, and a couple ancient forms of wheat.
Grits remain his first love, though. Given his “guaranteed satisfaction” recipe, it’s little wonder: “Pot licker” grits include pork sausage, butter and heirloom yellow corn. Simple but profound.
“You won’t be able to resist licking the pot as clean as a whistle,” he vows.
When you savor a dish like that, it’s worth simultaneously savoring the fact that this simple food has been helping people thrive on our continent for thousands of years. Now it’s high cuisine in the Low Country.
Lifelong journalist and editor Eric Lucas lives on a small farm on an island north of Seattle, where he grows organic hay, garlic, apples, beans and corn—an heirloom red flour corn that he grinds into grits for his household.
Looking for more Southern cooking basics? Here you go.
