Designer grits

by Diane Duane


Cheddar-chipotle timbale of grits
An idea whose time has come.

Don’t think I’m making fun of this. I like grits. (The voice from the next room says, “And I married you anyway…!”) My mother was a Maryland woman, and passed on to me her great fondness for them. (Before the inevitable question arises: I am a butter-salt-and-pepper-on-my-grits person. I’ve never understood the sugar-and-milk-on-breakfast-grits school of thought, but in the interests of human diversity, and in a world this size, I’m sure we can all agree to Just Get Along.)

Yes, most commercially-marketed grits have tasted mostly like wallpaper paste for a long time. And forget the “instant” stuff: you could use it for spackle. I prefer the rougher texture of the grits of my childhood…but for a long time they’ve been nowhere to be found. However, it looks like they’re having a renaissance. Something else to add to my next order at Albertsons…

By the way, there’s a strange resonance in this issue to something that’s been going on in Irish cuisine. There’s a dish called champ which was often a kids’ suppertime dish here in older days: essentially mashed potatoes with chopped-up scallions or green onions in it. It tends to have been cordially hated by Irish kids whose parents made them eat it. However, it’s been having a renaissance as a “cool food”: you run into designer champ now in quite pricey restaurants on both sides of the Irish Sea. (Our own St. Patrick’s day menu for our restaurateur friend in Basel, when we go over there to cook it next year, includes crown roast of rowanberry-and-red-wine-glazed Wicklow lamb with three champs — roasted garlic/clotted cream, spinach/nutmeg, and saffron/sweet potato: an edible Irish tricolor.) Yet another manifestation of the way food people keep searching for older, often peasant-based food styles and cuisines that have fallen by the wayside, and revive them as The Cool New Thing. Remember when rocket/aragula was a weed? Remember when people thought corn fungus was icky? Remember when no one would touch a pig cheek, let alone think about eating it?

I have to laugh sometimes at the upmarket pretensions that get heaped on what are often peasant-originated dishes or poor people’s food long rejected by those who didn’t have to eat “that stuff” any more. But it’s nonetheless great to see these solid, tasty foods rediscovered after having been dumped or forgotten for so long. Once the designer madness dies down, we can then get back to eating them just plain the way they are.

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