ISSUE 43, CHRISTMAS, Part 1: Christmas Grits
Christmas Grits, a traditional breakfast
The southern country breakfast on the day of the nativity used to be a favorite subject of writers, newspaper reporters, and travelers. It became something of a genre in magazines in the late 19th century. Surprisingly descriptions of the food rarely developed beyond naming the dishes. But there are a few noteworthy exceptions. The Carolina novelist William Gilmore Simms in a Christmas tale entitled “Maize-in-Milk” elaborated the pleasures of a country table in the early 1850s. Some of the dishes appear in every description of a Lowcountry holiday breakfast: rice cakes, rice waffles, cornbread, rye cakes, and biscuits. In Simms’s story, the meats were cold corned beef and boiled venison. Distinctive to Simms’s table was the black pudding, the southern answer to the Scottish haggis. “You shall find it a goodly commodity, taken along with its kindred, sausage and hominy, when the Yule log is blazing.” (Liver pudding usurped black pudding’s place in country cookery in the 20th century; black pudding was made of pig’s blood, onions, and rice.
But it is the hominy that Simms tells us most about because it was the heart and soul of Christmas breakfast. By hominy Simms means ‘small hominy’ or grits. And he is quite precise in his description.
“Now, your yellow corn won’t do for hominy—the color and the flavor are alike against it. It must be the genuine semitransparent flint, ground at a water-mill, white as snow, and swelling out in two huge platters at convenient places upon the table. A moderate portion of each plate is provided with this vegetable, boiled to a due consistency: neither too soft, like mush, nor too stiff, hard, and dry for easy adjustment with a spoon. It requires long experience on the part of the cook to prepared this dish for the just appreciation of an adept. There must be no rising lump in the mass; there must be no dark speck upon the surface. The spoon should like upon it without sinking below the rims . . . . The Carolina breakfast-table would be a blank without hominy”, [“Maize-in-Milk,” Marie de Berniere (Philadelphia, 1853), pp. 354-55].
One of the disasters of 20th century agriculture in the coastal South was the loss of the white flint corn that enabled this masterwork of breakfast cuisine. When the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation undertook its restoration of classic ingredients, sea island white flint corn was high on the list of desired items. We discovered that seed survived in in Florida and in South Carolina—maintained by old families. Two years ago Anson Mills made the restored Flint corn grits available again. So if you want to make traditional hominy for Christmas breakfast, it can be done . . .