TO UNITE the word “grits” with the word “soufflé” is like putting a hat on a donkey. Grits, groats, grout, gruel are Old English words of a granite beauty, strength, and resonance. They tell of hard times, of rural folk, and of orphans starved by lying, fat caretakers in Dickens. Gruel, according to the O.E.D., can also mean punishment. Yet sophisticated chefs such as Lee Bailey and the late Craig Claiborne, both from the South, have given a nod to the grits soufflé while doing their cooking and writing with haute assurance on Long Island. For me, the word “grits,” with its plebeian ring, in a defiant marriage with the pomp and puff”, if it does puff”, of a soufflé is the attraction of the dish.
Grits are distressingly bland and tasteless, but, light and airy, they can be souffléed, a process that even the most vivacious whipped egg whites could not accomplish with a mixture of oatmeal and water. The Deep American South is the home of grits; they are scarce in the repertoire of the Upper South of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. Rosalynn Carter in the Carters’ parsimonious White House brought a bit of national exposure to Baked Cheese Grits. Sharp—very sharp—cheddar cheese is advised as a companion to the evanescent grits in baked dishes. If there were no cheese, you would be eating air with a bit of salt in it.
On a yellowing sheet of newsprint in a kitchen drawer I find Claiborne discussing grits with red-eye—sometimes called redneck—gravy. For red-eye gravy one needs to fry a piece of country ham, stir the leavings, and add black coffee to the pan. Country ham, of the Southern sort, is ham long hung in a smokehouse most likely to be in the back yard. It is the subject of a regional snort of superiority when sent North, perhaps as a Christmas present, only to be thrown out because it is covered with mold, as it rightly will be.
Southerners away from home practice a dip into ethnicity, memory roots, or what might be called a downscale affectation. The cuisine of the Southern states is rich in possibilities, many with a naming fortitude, such as gumbo, an okra soup. Virgil Thomson, composer, master chef, and a Southerner who spent his adult life at Harvard, in Paris, and, at last, at the Chelsea Hotel, in New York, was called on sometimes to prepare wilted lettuce, lettuce dressed with cooked bacon and warm grease from the frying pan. No matter the arterially threatening grease, Thomson lived past ninety. Of course, he was not thin, owing to the wilted lettuce and more refined preparations. He used to visit Montecatini to take the waters in summer, but then “I get it all back by Christmas.”
1996