My friend Desi is a Southerner stuck in Chicago for 20 years now. He pines for, well, pines. Specifically the piney woods of Mississippi where we grew up. I periodically remind him about humidity, the fact that the bugs are going to be big enough this summer to saddle and ride to work, and that our legislators are more interested in our bathroom habits than paved roads.
I’m not trying to talk him out of it; I’m being realistic. After 20 years the memories of home are more of the misty, water-colored variety. CRAWFISH! SPIDER LILIES! SCREEN DOORS! But I would love for him to move to Memphis so I’d have an opportunity to make him some shrimp and grits. Mine are outstanding.
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Shrimp and grits
There is a chicken recipe which has been printed and reprinted and shared a million times. It’s called Engagement Chicken, and it first appeared in Glamour magazine about 30 years ago. Supposedly your boyfriend will propose to you after eating this chicken. I’ve not made this particular chicken, but I’ve made roast chicken with lemon. That’s what this is.
I don’t want to say bad things about this chicken, but I generally eschew any item of food, clothing, or scent that purports to be a marriage trap. It is my foolish belief that marriage is a sacred institution into which both parties should be scared witless to commit themselves. Having said that, I’m aware my husband and I are married because of my shrimp and grits.
We courted each other by fixing dinner. Fast forward a few years, and Chuck’s birthday was approaching. He wanted shrimp and grits. I did not have my own recipe, but I knew there was only one place to go: Oxford. I used John Currence’s recipe as my base. I changed it up a little, but my deepest held conviction about shrimp and grits is that the closest a tomato should get to it is in the salad you serve on the side. Yada yada yada, we were married four months later.
I don’t tell that story so that desperate young women will sear millions of pounds of shrimp in an attempt to walk down the aisle via an unsuspecting stomach. No, I tell this story because I like to take every opportunity I can to brag about my shrimp and grits and because Desi sent me a recipe for a dish which uses — siddown, this is big — instant grits. I KNOW! I clutched my pearls, too.
Listen, I’m not going to lie. I’m down with the quick-cooking grits even though, honestly, no kind of grits takes that long to make. But instant? ARE WE ANIMALS? I looked at the comments about this dish expecting to hear a chorus of disdain for instant grits, and there was some of that. But the singers hitting the back of the house were doing so with an old-fashioned grits bashing.
Gross! Grits are disgusting! Shrimp with grits?! To you grits-bashers out there I say, shuddup. Do you eat polenta? Of course you do. Polenta is faincy. A fancy name for grits. It’s all corn mush!
So those — ugh! — tubes of polenta you get in the produce section and take home to be all international? Why? You wouldn’t buy a pre-made tube of oatmeal would you? It’s all mush like every farmer has eaten for centuries in this country, Europe, Africa, and I could go on.
This is humble food we’re talking about. The great thing about it is that you can dress it up with vegetables, or cheese, or lots of cheese, or cheese and lots of garlic. And you can, I suppose, eat it with cream and sugar, but I don’t know why you’d want to. If you are so inclined as I was, make what the cooking magazine referred to as braised short ribs and root vegetables on a bed of Stilton polenta and garnished with gremolata, but I knew was just pot roast with cheese grits and garnished with lemon zest and parsley.
Maybe the problem isn’t the grits themselves; it’s food with such working-class ties. Eating hand-cut buttermilk scones with Vermont cheddar pimento cheese and house-cured ham is a whole different experience than serving cathead biscuits with your mama’s pimento cheese and country ham. One is not better than the other. You may be more comfortable eating catfish goujons with capered aioli and black-eyed pea caviar, but it’s still fried catfish with tartar sauce and black-eyed pea salad.
Do you really want to associate with people who are so filled with first-world ennui they can’t enjoy a damn bowl of grits? Such people should be thumped soundly and percussively upon the gourd.
Besides, as Desi reminded me, “Telling someone to ‘kiss my polenta’ just doesn’t have the same effect.”
Susan Wilson writes for yeahandanotherthing.com and likethedew.com. She and her husband Chuck have lived here long enough to know that Midtown does not start at Highland.