Peace and Hominy Grits to everyone!

And as a result of my recent visit back home to Maude, Oklahoma, I was reminded that there is an indeterminate geographic “grits line” somewhere South of the Kansas-Oklahoma state border. North of it when your order breakfast, you usually get hash browns. But south of the ‘grits line” when you order breakfast it comes with grits whether you like them or not.

Hominy grits have been around for a long time. Most adult males of a certain age know all about grits. That’s because they were exposed to them while in the service. Most Army bases used to be located in the South, so if you went off post and had breakfast, you had grits.

Grits don’t have much nutritional value, they aren’t much to look at, and they don’t have a lot of taste. But they do go down smooth and fill an empty morning stomach with a broad, comfortable blandness. Ham and eggs with a side of grits could possible hold the key to eternal happiness.

For the those readers who have never benefited from being exposed to grits a little education could be helpful. Grits start as hard shelled corn. It requires a boiling bath in a mixture of water and lye to eat away or separate the indigestible hull of each kernel before it is ever considered for human consumption. Rinsed many time to remove the lye, the grain is then cooked for several hours until the whole kernels are soft, making hominy, or dried and ground to a consistency just short of the fineness of cornmeal, making “raw” grits. At this stage, the substance is portable and its preparation is so easy and fast that it has to be the forerunner of “fast food”: you just add water, salt to taste and boil until done. The finished product look a lot like ‘Cream of Wheat’ breakfast cereal.

You either love grits or hate them. There is not middle ground. One of the benefits of eating grits (According to a rumor going around in the late 1940’s) was that they sopped up any radiation your body might have accumulated.

My mother had five sisters. They all lived fairly close when I was growing up and the six were pretty much divided down the middle on the use of homemade grits or store bought grits. Thank God, my mother was on the store bought side and the grits we ate at home were always consistent in taste and texture.

Aunt Mary Sue on the other hand went all out for homemade grits. In her backyard she had a ten gallon iron pot to boil her grits in. It would sit on three rocks with a fire under it. My cousin Joel Don was in charge of keeping the fire going and keeping the mess stirred up. He always tried to be sick or something when Aunt Mary Sue made grits. He would spend the whole day carrying water and emptying out the iron pot. Joel Don claimed making grits was worst than wash day, but I didn’t believe it. Aunt Mary Sue’s grits were not popular with my brother and I because they were always lumpy and had a acrid aftertaste of lye and ash.

Over the years I have lost my taste for grits and nowadays I can take them or leave them. However, whenever I do have them, it’s like a stroll down memory lane.