Grits are a staple of the Deep South. You usually won’t find them on the menu at a standard breakfast place in Kentucky. Tennessee is 50/50. Here in central Appalachia some people make cornmeal mush, but I’ve never seen it in a restaurant. (A more common breakfast or late-night treat is leftover cornbread mashed up into a glass of buttermilk.) Hominy is pretty common in Appalachia, but it’s usually cooked and eaten whole instead of being ground up for grits.
Hush puppies come with fried seafood throughout the South in my experience, and even well into the Midwest. I’ve only ever seen them served with barbecue in the Carolinas, mostly in NC.
On this side of the water we have porridge (from oats), pease pudding (from dried yellow peas) and mushy peas (mashed up marrowfat peas), also there’s Dutch hutspot (or hotchpotch - mashed up potatoes, carrots and onions). I have porridge for breakfast in the cold months, can’t stand the ones with peas, but have been known to mash up leftover potatoes and vegetables into potato cakes or “bubble and squeak”. If I understand correctly, grits is made with maize, which makes it a cousin of mealie meal and samp in southern Africa.
Everyone, I guess, has some form of mash of the local cheap and prolific carbohydrate (Burns Night tonight in Scotland, so “bashed tatties and neaps” to go with the haggis).
Once I ordered shrimp and grits from a takeout restaurant near the beach. I got a styrofoam box with a generous serving of unsalted instant grits, topped with a few boiled farmed shrimp. It was a fucking travesty.
Y’all who haven’t had shrimp and grits: done correctly, it’s heavenly. The grits are cooked with broth and milk (or cream) and cheese; the shrimp and Carolina-caught (ideally, but don’t use farmed shrimp, farmed shrimp are nasty gelatinous posers), and everything is heavily spiced with onions and paprika and cayenne and pepper. They’re grits dressed up for the Met Gala.
I was in Galveston last week, and our trolley driver was raving about a place that was famous for its shrimp & grits, a combo I find revolting (I don’t like shrimp, either).
Grits is probably most often compared to polenta. The main difference is that grits is most often (but not always) made with white maize/corn or hominy (nixtamalized corn) Polenta is typically made with yellow flint corn and never nixtamalized, while grits is usually dent corn. They are fairly similar products, but they do have their own textures and flavors. Some say they are “the same thing,” but I don’t think you can have had both and say they are exactly the same. That said, they can be substituted for each other in a lot of dishes, with a slight change in flavor/texture.
They are here as well. And, supposedly, they are named after the deep fried cornmeal fritter.
Hush puppies are not croquettes. You might play croquet with some of them. If the dog wasn’t outside at the time. There’s hot water cornbread that is similar to a croquette.
Shrimp and grits are some new age crap. I ain’t eating them together. Cheese and any seafood bother me. Yuck.
Well, I can tell you that grits have made it all the way to South Brooklyn
I serve my Pre-K class breakfast every morning in our classroom, and at least twice a week I’m given a huge tray of grits to give out. In the center of this huge pan is always one lonely piece of American cheese floating on top.
I stir it all together, then give out the food. The teachers and Admin Aide are required to eat with our children, so we take a small portion as well.
Grits are… well, an acquired taste.
I know they’re instant, and if made the proper way they’d probably taste much better. For the most part the kids do tend to gobble it down.
You’re right — they are somewhat newish. Most sources seem to say it goes to the 50s, originating in Lowcountry (South Carolina), though I see at least one source claiming a recipe from the 30s. When I make it, I reduce the cheese by at least half, because it is a lot of cheese in most recipes.
We had a half full box of grits in the pantry for years at home when I was a kid. Never touched 'em, but in the '70s I started traveling to East Texas regularly and got hooked on the hushpuppies at a fast food joint called “Catfish King.”
Grits are all over these days. I wish my mom had fired up that box, I love 'em now.
But, like so many Southern dishes, the real story of shrimp and grits goes back much further—and embodies the painful past of slavery. For the book, I spoke with Michael Twitty, food historian and author of the James Beard award-winning The Cooking Gene. I’d heard him speak during the 2016 Southern Foodways Alliance Fall Symposium, where he gave a talk titled “Black Corn,” which traced the roots of several corn-based dishes back to Africa. During the talk, he boldly declared, “I don’t care what anyone says; shrimp and grits came from Mozambique.” The statement came with backup—he told of dishes from that country involving corn and shellfish, a combination that appeared long before anyone in Charleston was eating it for breakfast.
Of course, that’s the dish’s ancestry. The modern dish appears much more modern, according to this article:
Despite the many hands—black, brown, and white—that prepared the dish over time, it was Bill Neal, a white chef raised in Grover, North Carolina, who, taking inspiration from that original combination of shellfish and ground corn, created a version of the dish that became cemented in the cuisine of the American South. During his early career cooking at La Residence in Chapel Hill, he drew inspiration from French cuisine. He later left La Res to open Crook’s Corner, which began with the same European sensibility. But, in 1984, a visit from a New York journalist caused him to rethink his direction altogether.
Craig Claiborne, longtime food editor of the New York Times, came to town to research an article—he wanted a tour of Eastern North Carolina barbecue and asked Bill Neal to guide him. In spending time with Claiborne, who hailed from Mississippi, Neal started to think more intently about his own cooking style. He’d long celebrated European cuisine and technique, but Claiborne helped him see that his authentic connection to Southern was just as worthy of celebration. A vision was crystallized—Neal decided to devote his attention to Southern food. Shortly after that visit, Neal took a leave from Crook’s to work on a cookbook and hosted Claiborne in his kitchen, inspiring a profile in the Times about the young chef from Chapel Hill, as well as a recipe for Neal’s shrimp with cheese grits. Through the words of Claiborne’s story, and from behind the stove at Crook’s, the dish shot into the culinary mainstream, appearing on menus across the South almost instantly.
I get not liking seafood and cheese–it’s not normally my favorite combination–but the blend of ingredients in shrimp and grits is so much better than the sum of its parts. The cheese fades into the background as just one more source of umami richness. Still, de gustibus and all.
Definitely. Grits are pretty common here, if you’re in a sort of “down home” breakfast place. They typically aren’t cheese grits though, unless you’re specifically getting some sort of shrimp and grits type dish. Which like others have said, is something that’s not native to Texas- it started showing up on restaurant menus maybe 20 years ago at the earliest.
Hushpuppies are ubiquitous at fried fish places. Doesn’t seem to matter if it’s catfish or some kind of coastal place with saltwater fish either. Ours have diced jalapenos in them sometimes as well.
No… grits are more properly described as hominy grits, meaning they’re made from nixtamalized corn.
Hah! I came here to say I’ve had shrimp&grits at a high-end tapas place. I liked them. I had regular grits in Florida when I was visiting my son. Loved them. Hush puppies I don’t get. Fried dough?
I miss both Hush Puppies and grits (real, Speckled Heart grits, with some of the bran in there). We don’t get them Up North here… though one little place had a shrimp ‘n’ grits special one night. They were wonderful.
I’ve seen multiple posters say “Don’t use instant grits, make real grits!” But where do you get them? I’ve looked at different local grocery stores and they only seem to have instant. (Near the oatmeal.) Are the real ones somewhere else in the store? Or do I just need to order them online? What brand(s) should I be looking for?
Grits are quite common on the menu in NE Ohio. The default is savory, of course. Sugar in grits is for children. I don’t think I’ve seen a seafood place here that serves fried fish and didn’t also have hush puppies.
