Posted by
drpete on Wednesday, May 06, 2009 1:36:55 PM
What are grits? a guest column by JT. JT Stevens is a retired paramedic (previously a professor of music) from Douglasville, Georgia, a few miles west of Atlanta
As what is known in these parts as a “Damn Yankee,” I
have given some thought to what grits are. (Parenthetically, thus the brackets,
the question might more accurately be “What is grits?” since “grits” is probably a
collective noun.)
Before going any further, those new to the area, no
doubt from up north (above Cartersville), should know that there are two kinds
of Yankees: Damn Yankees and Dumb Yankees. The Dumb Yankees go back
north.
To return to the subject, I had the pleasure recently of
reading a piece in the Chapel Hill News & Views by Frank Parham. His answer
to the title question: Nobody knows. Well, thanks to my friends at the Douglas
County Fire Department, particularly Chief Ed Daniell, I believe I
do.
I have only been a Damn Yankee for a little over 30
years, so I don’t actually personally know a real-live moonshiner. But I know a
few who do. From them I have learned a little of the honorable, if illegal, art
of distilling corn likker. It takes skill and patience. And corn. And water. And
time.
First, take the corn and soak it in water. The cobs can
go over to the outhouse. Eventually, you end up with a wet mush that you then
must separate into the good stuff (fermenting golden water) and the “slag.” The
slag is (are?) the grits.
Done right, all of the value is in the liquid. What is
left over is a completely tasteless, Chemically inert white powder.
Unfortunately, chemists (as we shall refer to them to protect and honor these
“spirited entrepreneurs”) found
that if they left this useless slag lying in the open, when it rained, the water
would re-hydrate this slag, it would grow and spread exponentially, and
eventually mark them as afoul of the Treasury Agents. (I came to see this
phenomenon one morning when a pot of grits was left boiling on the stove. The
contents not only filled the kitchen but the engine bay at the Fire
Department!)
What to do with the slag. Moonshiners eventually started
putting it in barrels. But what to do with the barrels? (They, too, were a dead
giveaway, especially if a T-man asked what was in them.) We don’t know exactly
who it was that decided to label the barrel, identifying the contents as
GRITS. It eliminated that awkward
question, but when asked what he was going to do with the Grits, he is reported
to have answered, “Sell them, of course!”
And so he did. Cheap. 49 cents a
barrel.
Don’t know who first taste-tested the new stuff.
Probably hoped for some leftover taste from the fluid so carefully separated
from the slag. But if you were hungry enough, you could put some fatback
drippings on them and fill your gut until some food became available. Nowadays, we just
add a lot of butter, salt and pepper, and then mash ‘em all up with the runny
eggs on the plate, sopping them up with the biscuits. Don’t know why we don’t
just eat the food!
Better question: Why
Are Grits? I propose a contest. Let us see who can come up with
something more useless than
grits. (Can’t be Kudzu; it keeps the soil in place.)