Grits and Where the Crawdads Sing

There is always a story that connects us with food.  And sometimes there is a book and movie as well.  In this case, it’s Delia Owens’ 2018 novel Where the Crawdads Sing—a coming-of-age story, murder mystery, legal drama and love story that topped the New York Times bestseller list in 2019 and has now been on the list longer than any other book.  CBS Sunday Morning did a feature 7/10/2022 on the book and Reese Witherspoon’s movie adaptation that comes to theaters this month.

In the story, Kya Clark lives in a shack in a coastal marsh region of North Carolina.  At the age of ten, she is left completely alone to fend for herself.  Fiercely independent and a keen observer of the natural world, Kya learns how to survive with little help from the residents of the nearby town of Barkley Cove.  What she has is true grit and a recipe for survival. One of Kya’s earliest memories is of her mother cooking grits every morning for breakfast.  “I don’t know how to do life without grits,” Kya muses.  To survive on her own, grits become her daily sustenance.  At the town diner in Barkley Cove, shrimp with pimento-cheese grits is the cook’s most popular specialty.  

An unanticipated connection to Owen’s novel came to light when I was invited to join a book club’s discussion of Where the Crawdads Sing three years ago. Frankye Mehrle, a senior member, brought everyone a package of white corn grits—organically grown on the fifth generation McKaskle family farm in the upper South Missouri bootheel town of Braggadocio where she grew up. Knowing little or nothing about preparing grits, I did some reading up on the subject.

In the introduction to her NY Times “Shrimp and Grits” recipe (10/7/18), food writer Julia Reed notes, “Once a popular morning meal throughout the South, shrimp and grits is no longer restricted to breakfast tables below the Mason-Dixon line. Variations of the dish now appear on breakfast, lunch and dinner menus across the country from Maine to Oregon.”  Unlike Kya in Owens’ novel and residents of Braggadocio, MO, I didn’t grow up eating grits.  However, I do have a little history with polenta, a yellow corn Italian cousin of grits.  

Corn first arrived in northeastern Italy in the 16th century where it quickly became an important staple—especially in poor areas prone to famine where it was sometimes the only food eaten by mountain peasants. Today it accompanies all traditional dishes in the Alpine region of Friuli near the border of the former Yugoslavia.  My connection to polenta dates back to an earlier chapter in life twenty years ago when Kit and I traveled to Italy with a group led by an Italian-born chef we’d met in Chicago.  Each day of that amazing trip we ate a meal cooked by a local chef from a menu our friend had provided.  

After returning home, I bought a copper “paiolo”—a classic polenta pot with top-heavy proportions that looks like it belongs in Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art. Why, you might be wondering, was a specialized 7 1/2-inch-tall pot with a 5 ½ inch base and 10-inch-wide top needed for polenta which, after all, is just cornmeal, water and salt?  If you’ve ever made polenta or grits, you may have experienced some challenges.  Cornmeal gets lumpy and during the 20-30 minutes of cooking, it must be stirred constantly with a wooden spoon to avoid sticking to the bottom of the pan.  When it thickens, it begins to bubble and spew like one of Yellowstone National Park’s volcanic hot mud pots.  

After finding myself in in possession of a bag of Braggadocio white corn grits, I shined up my copper paiolo pot with its long wooden handle and equally long spoon and put it to use.  It was time to prepare my first shrimp and grits dinner.

First, I contacted Frankye Mehrle and asked her how she prepares grits.  “They are best with garlic cheddar cheese,” she told me, “but it’s not easy to find.”  Happily, I found a wedge of Yancey’s Fancy New York artisan roasted garlic aged cheddar cheese at a local market’s deli counter.  I then checked the index of an illustrated spiral-bound recipe book my mother had found at an estate sale in San Antonio years ago and found the recipe I was looking for.

The cookbook contained recipes compiled by Ethel Rayson Dixon born in Shreveport, Louisiana.  One of eight children, she traveled the world but preferred simple meals like those cooked in her mother’s old black cast iron pot.  Her “Baked Grits” recipe is made with 1 cup grits, 4-1/4 cups water, ½ cup butter, ¾ cup cheese, 3 eggs, ¾ cup milk, 1 tsp. salt, ¼ tsp. red pepper.  Cook grits in the salted water.  As grits begin to thicken, add butter and cheese.  Beat eggs and milk.  Add to grits mixture.  Pour into baking dish.  Bake 350 degrees for 25 minutes.  

Dixon’s baked grits are delicious with shrimp sautéed in olive oil and garlic with a side of pan-roasted cherry tomatoes, garlic and corn. Behind the simple taste of grits are food stories, Delia Owens’ wonderful book, and a movie I can’t wait to see some hot July afternoon this summer.