She Got Grit(s)

My favorite niece (I'm calling her that in order to get the other favorite nieces' attention) recently posted the fact that she was in South Carolina eating shrimp and grits. And here I thought she was a very sophisticated, cultured and intelligent person. Guess I was wrong if she's actually admitting to eating Grits!

Now, I've done time ('scuse me, spent time) in the South and I know they love their grits. The thing is...I can't abide them. I've eaten wall paper paste with more flavor. Which might explain why I never, ever felt at home in the South. The rest of my family thinks of it as their home, but the Southern inoculation never took on me. I am unrepentantly a Yankee. I fully expect to be struck off a few Facebook pages because of this statement. Whenever a die-hard Southerner hears me say that I hate grits, they assure me I just haven't had them prepared properly. (gag)

Because aside from the flavorless, colorless blah gritty texture (at least they are aptly named), it's the preparation that puts me off. Grits, for the uninformed, are made from hominy. And hominy is made from corn kernels that have been soaked like 52 years in lye. You heard me. Lye.
The same stuff which is poisonous when ingested. The same stuff that you don't dare handle with bare hands, on account of it eats your skin off. You know, LYE.

And since grits are so colorless and flavorless, all the cooking shows are adding flavor and color like crazy in order to make the crap palatable. Evidently grits are the new sushi...I've discussed at length in a prior blog how I feel about raw fish. The hoity-toity chefs, proving that they are all about slumming it these days, prepare grits a hundred different ways. They add tons of butter, they add milk (gives all that grit at least some creaminess, purportedly), they add shrimp, they add peppers, they add cheese. A waste of good cheese and shrimp if you ask me.

If a food has so little flavor that it requires Herculean efforts to give it taste, why not take some shrimp and cheese and peppers and just make a dish out of that? Why ruin good food with grits?

The South is all about claiming grits as their staple food. Georgia (as in the State of) has declared grits to be their "state prepared food". (Don't get me started on states, including mine, having a State this and State that and State the other. Not content with just a State flower, they have State amphibians and insects and autumn trees and spring trees and dogs and microbe.)

Trouble is, the Native Americans were the first to manufacture the stuff and it was their dish, not the South's. Yet another contribution Native Americans have given European culture that goes unacknowledged.

So, while I know I will offend quite a few of my Southern friends and family with this unmasking of the unholy origin of grits, maybe there are others out there, like me, who can't stand the stuff and have been too embarrassed or shy or polite to say so. Never let it be said that I was too polite to say I hate grits. I say we start a support group.