Have Yankees wiped out Southern grits?
I like grits. For those unfamiliar with this special food, it consists of corn that is dried, cleaned and ground into particles a little larger than cream of wheat. They are white and, when cooked properly, are the perfect accompaniments for eggs, ham, bacon or sausage.
I like mine with butter and salt and a little pepper.
Some like them with red-eye gravy.
A friend from West Virginia put me onto the delicacy when I was a teen. I immediately asked my mother if she could buy some the next time she went to the grocery store.
“You want what?’ she exclaimed.
She acquiesced but I was the only person in our home who ate them.
But since then there has been a love affair between my taste buds and grits.
I was amazed that no one above the Mason-Dixon Line seemed to know much about grits, or, if they did, disdained them.
Imagine my glee when, on my first trip into the Deep South, I stopped at a restaurant for breakfast and was automatically served a bowl of grits with my order. “I didn’t order these,’ I said to the waitress, asking her to make sure to add it to my check.
“Ah, honey,’ she replied, “We serve them with all our meals.’
I was in heaven.
When I finally struck out on my own and began grocery shopping, I always made sure I had a carton or sack of grits in my pantry.
However, I noticed something disturbing while on vacation recently.
My lovely wife and I traveled below the Mason-Dixon Line, far enough below to consider where we were as the South. We spent several days in Fredericksburg, Va., which is positioned about halfway between Washington, D.C., and Richmond.
And, during our visit, we ate a number of meals.
Unfortunately, we weren’t familiar enough with the area to know which local dining places were good so we ate our first few meals at chain restaurants.
Driving by one eatery, I noticed its parking lot was nearly full. To me that’s a good sign the food must be pretty good.
We stopped and ordered breakfast.
I was disappointed there were no grits listed on the menu.
None were brought to the table, either, as gratuity.
Preparing to leave I asked the waitress, “Do you have grits?’
“Oh, yes,’ she said, almost apologetically.
We stopped at another local diner the following morning. Once more I ordered breakfast and this time, grits were on the menu.
But what arrived could hardly be called real southern grits. They were soupy and soggy, completely unlike those that I had been served years before.
Probably two dining experiences are not enough to establish a trend. But I think the decline of grits that I noticed might be due to a migration of northerners that have infiltrated the southern food service industry.
It’s probably part of a nefarious plot to deprive real Southerners of a portion of their heritage.
Or it could be they just don’t care much for grits anymore.
You decide.
Have a good day.
Jim Pletcher is the Herald-Standard’s business editor. E-mail: jpletcher@heraldstandard.com.