“You tried grits but didn’t like them?”
Greg Johnsman, a stalwart South Carolina grits producer and evangelist, is ever ready to embrace this discussion.
“You just haven’t had good grits cooked right,” he said. “I‘d say you need to try my ’pot-licker' recipe, as in you won’t be able to resist licking the pot clean as a whistle. It’s got sausage, cheese, and ground heirloom corn whose flavor ranges from sweet to nutty.”
Mr. Johnsman considers the days of “flavorless, gloppy white corn grits cooked badly” old news. The heirloom varieties he and other producers offer today are distinctive, multicolored, and deeply flavored, with varietal differences as individual as you’d find in potatoes.
“We’re in the grits renaissance. They’re cool. They’re in Michelin-star restaurants. Everybody’s catching on. I worked a while back with a chef from Sweden. Sweden!”
The heritage is deep, and the diversity is vast. But in the pantheon of corn, grits are a mere grain of sand.
The Grits Heartland
Corn was first domesticated 6,000 years ago in southern Mexico, derived from a wild grass called teosinte. It spread through the Western Hemisphere as far north as Canada, spanned North America from the Pacific to the Atlantic, and was a mainstay of indigenous life. Historians believe members of the Southeast coastal Muskogee tribe taught the first European settlers about corn and grits. It soon became a staple food for pioneers, small farmers, and everyday Carolinians.Now, the vast majority of corn grown in the United States—almost 90 percent of the total 350 million tons—is used for livestock feed or industrial purposes such as ethanol and corn syrup. The remainder, just over 10 percent, is used for direct human consumption in tortillas, chips, grits, cornbread, and other foods based on dried corn. Barely 1 percent of the total crop is sweet corn meant to be eaten fresh.
Nonetheless, say “corn” and the latter is what comes to mind for most Americans.
But not in South Carolina, the center of the “Low Country” grits heartland. Visitors to this Georgia-Carolinas coastal area can hardly pick up a restaurant menu without encountering shrimp and grits, a savory and rich lunch or dinner dish that also reflects the fact this is one of the few places where locally caught wild shrimp is still common. In Charleston, Hyman’s, the premier seafood emporium on the city’s dining street, has five different grits-based items, including shrimp and grits. Just up the street, Virginia’s offers a version that blends in sausage, pepper, onions, and Creole gravy. And at the traditionally minded East Side Soul Food, it’s grits and fish (fried whiting).
There’s even a “World Grits Festival” each April in St. George, a small rural town an hour east of Charleston that claims to register the highest per capita grits consumption on Earth. Among other things, the festival sports an event in which volunteers happily sink into and roll around in a massive trough of cooked grits.
As “The Charleston News and Courier” proclaimed in 1952: “An inexpensive, simple, and thoroughly digestible food, [grits] should be made popular throughout the world. Given enough of it, the inhabitants of planet Earth would have nothing to fight about. A man full of [grits] is a man of peace.”
Well, not quite yet. The world at large is still awaiting the peace and grits revolution. Undaunted, the South Carolina Legislature declared grits the Palmetto State’s official food in 1999:
“Whereas, grits has been a part of the life of every South Carolinian of whatever race, background, gender, and income.”
Labor of Love
That’s definitely true for Mr. Johnsman, who was born and raised in upstate South Carolina, near Greenville. He immigrated to the Low Country around Charleston to set up a farm stand and grist mill.Grist milling is where Mr. Johnsman started his journey to becoming a grits expert. The ancient art of stone grain grinding was his first love, born in his apprenticeship to a miller during his teens.
“The sound, the smell, the sight, the repetitive rhythm—I love the music that milling plays,” he said.
Grits are the coarsest ground version of dried corn (thus the name). Polenta is slightly finer and must be cooked longer and more carefully. Cornmeal is finer, and corn flour (found in tortillas, tamales, and such) is finer still. Of the four main types of corn—flint, dent, sweet, and pop—grits are usually made from dent corn, named for the small indentation on the top of the kernel.
Mr. Johnsman’s venture into heirloom grits began when Low Country residents brought him unique varieties of corn, often family heirlooms, to custom grind for them. It was a modern iteration of an old tradition in which farmers a century ago or more brought their crop to a local grist mill and paid for grinding—not with cash, but with corn. The grower took his share of ground corn home, and the miller sold the remainder to the general public.
Grits are as versatile as rice, and regional variations abound.
“In Chicago, they prefer yellow grits,” Mr. Johnsman said. “In North Carolina, that’s animal feed.”
Marsh Hen Mill offers yellow, white, blue, red, pink, and speckled grits (a mix of white and yellow). They have memorable old-timey names, such as Jimmy Red, Guinea Flint, and Sea Island Blue—corn varieties that were rescued from near-extinction by Mr. Johnsman and other enthusiasts. A pink variety dubbed “Unicorn” was down to a single remaining cob, whose 100 seeds a local resident brought Mr. Johnsman in a Ziploc bag. Corn is wind-pollinated and notoriously promiscuous, so it must be grown in isolation. Mr. Johnsman planted it all by itself in a garden near his farm stand, and only after four years of trialing was it ready for production.
Mr. Johnsman is a student of corn in general—its history, its biology, and its innumerable varieties. Terms such as pericarp, endosperm, daylight sensitivity, recessive genes, acidity, starch levels, and more race through his conversation like songbirds in orchards.
He’s a true believer, in other words, who was almost universally told he was crazy when he started years ago establishing a grist mill business largely based on heirloom corn varieties. Mainstream feed corn varieties produce about 600 bushels per acre. Jimmy Red produces about 60 bushels. The corn varieties that small farmers now grow for Mr. Johnsman are a labor of love.
He now has three different grist mills running in his production facility, his grits appear on restaurant menus throughout the South, and his master’s degree in agricultural education is put to good use as he proselytizes for grits everywhere he goes.
The Real Nitty-Gritty on Cooking Grits
Cooking grits is easy, but not quick. Mr. Johnsman advises bringing 4 cups of water to a boil, adding 1 cup of grits, a pinch of salt, and a bit of butter. Reduce it to a simmer and cook for 25 to 45 minutes, stirring often and adding more water as needed. Some cooks soak grits in warm water overnight, which shortens the morning cooking time by about half.If you want to make Mr. Johnsman’s “pot-licker” recipe, prepare grits as above, but in the last 10 minutes, crumble in one log (a pound) of Jimmy Dean pork sausage, add one can of Rotel hot tomato sauce, and finish with cheese as desired.
“This is a basic, down-home, blue-collar food,” Mr. Johnsman said. “Easy to grow. Stores well for years. Easy to cook. Generations ago, grits were not served in the plantation estate home’s dining room on bone china; they were in the workers’ cottages. Sure, you can church it up with stuff like cream, honey, bacon, gourmet add-ons like that, but if you have good grits cooked well, a pat of butter will do.”
