Grits
Wash and pick carefully. 2 cups grits. 3 cups water. Salt to taste.
Cook in boiling water for 1 hour.
Four lines of instruction that assume a cook who already knows what grits should look like coming off the stove. The ratio is the part to question.
- The water is far too littleTwo cups of grits to three cups of water is a ratio of 1.5:1, which will seize into a stiff paste long before an hour is up. Stone-ground grits generally want 4 to 5 parts liquid to 1 part grain; keep boiling water at hand and add it as the pot thickens.
- "Wash and pick carefully"Early twentieth-century grits arrived from the mill with chaff, hull fragments and the occasional stone. Rinsing also floats off loose bran and germ. Bagged grits today need neither picking nor washing, though rinsing stone-ground meal still removes some bitterness from the hull.
- Which grits this meansIn 1920 grits usually meant coarsely ground dried hominy or plain dent corn, often whole-grain and therefore perishable. Quick grits cook in 5 to 7 minutes and instant in one; neither wants an hour. Only true stone-ground grits reward the full time in the recipe.
- Use a double boiler or a heavy potAn hour of direct heat can scorch the bottom and thread burnt flecks through the batch. Period cookbooks frequently recommended a double boiler, which needs only occasional stirring; a heavy-bottomed saucepan over low heat needs stirring every few minutes.
- Salt earlySalt the water before the grain goes in. Grits absorb seasoning as they hydrate, and salt stirred in at the end sits on the surface rather than through the porridge.
- YieldWith the extra water suggested above, two cups of dry grits makes roughly eight cups cooked, enough for six to eight as a breakfast cereal or side; at the three cups the recipe specifies it would come out to much less. Leftovers set firm in a loaf pan overnight and can be sliced and fried.
Grits sit in the Cereals chapter because that is what they were to a national cookbook audience in 1920: a boiled breakfast grain, cheaper than eggs and filling. The word comes from Old English grytt, meaning coarse meal, and the dish itself descends from Indigenous Southeastern practice, where corn was soaked in an alkaline solution to make hominy and then ground. Mary A. Wilson wrote during and after the First World War, when the U.S. Food Administration was pressing households to substitute corn for wheat, and a plain hour-long pot of corn porridge was exactly the kind of economy her books were built to teach. The instruction to wash and pick suggests whole-grain grits that went rancid within weeks and arrived with whatever the millstones had left behind.