Grits Period COrigin theory BVerified

Grits is a porridge of coarsely ground corn simmered until soft, a staple of the Southern table. Seasoned with butter and salt and served hot at breakfast, it has come to stand for Southern life itself.

Corn, the dish's main ingredient, is a New World crop, and for the Native peoples of North America it was a long-established food, deeply rooted in the land. In the eastern part of the continent, corn farming had spread widely more than a thousand years ago. Dried corn was cracked into grits, treated with lye to soften it, and then boiled—Muscogee and other peoples of the Eastern Woodlands made their daily fare from porridge prepared this way. In its essentials, what we know as grits was already there at that stage.

The settlers who moved into the South in the seventeenth century took this way of eating from the Native peoples of the land. Boiling ground corn, and softening it with lye, were both originally Native techniques. In time the habit of adding butter and milk spread, and grits settled in as a fixture of the Southern breakfast. Because it was a plain, everyday food, it passed from one generation to the next not through fine restaurants or courts but through ordinary households.

When people picture grits, many imagine it as a Southern dish—something the settler culture of the American South created. A soft breakfast porridge seems to come straight from the old Southern kitchen.

But the roots of this porridge run deeper. Corn was a long-standing crop among the Native peoples of North America, and they cracked it into grits, softened it with lye, and boiled it into porridge. Here a word offers a clue. Hominy, the English name for hulled or ground-corn porridge, first appears around 1629 to 1630, in the records of the Virginia explorer John Smith. The word was borrowed from the Powhatan (Virginia Algonquian) uskatahomen, meaning "that which is ground or beaten." The very fact that English took in the Native word tells us this porridge was a Native food. The settlers did not invent grits from nothing; they received it from the people of the land—and that is today's settled view.

Even so, the matter is not entirely closed. There is a view that today's grits as a "Southern breakfast"—milled and cracked corn combined with milk and butter and eaten as a routine morning meal—took its present shape only after settler culture had spread. The English word grits itself originally referred, in Old English, to coarsely ground grain such as oats; its pairing with corn as hominy grits is recorded only around the mid-nineteenth century, about 1847 in the earliest example. Continuous with the Native porridge, it had nonetheless entered a different stage in method and in eating habit. This does not deny the Native origin; it is only a question of when the present Southern style set. Who first made grits, and when, cannot be traced from the sources. What is certain is the larger arc: this porridge was originally a Native food, and settlers took it up and raised it into an everyday dish of the South.