So, I’ve been thinking about this post I want to write, about fried grits.
Instead of what I want to be thinking about.
I did a writer’s retreat with a group of younger writers, a workshop called b-spec, a wonderfully curated and maintained group of writers and friends in Boston. I’ve been a part of the group for ten years or so, though mostly at the edges of it for five. Anyway, we take turns cooking–you fill out a google doc, what food you’ll make and when, and you cook for people. Everyone’s allergies and preferences are in the document. There’s a grocery list.
See the genius of this intentional community? Harnessing and channeling communitarian impulses? The group’s founder / leader is an amazing woman, successful novelist, professional graphic designer.
Anyway, I decided to make grits as my meal, as I figured not everyone had eaten them, and I had found them delightful during the pandemic. The old-fashioned, non-precooked grits have become harder and harder to find everywhere, especially up north, so I have been mail ordering the stuff in five pound bags, under a brand name that has been retired, because you know, the racism.
I boil sixteen cups of the coarsely ground maze in a green enameled cast iron dutch oven I got from my Mom, one of the few pieces of her kitchen that became part of mine when she died. It’s fun, nerve-wracking, and weird, cooking for over a dozen people. How much you get to make. It feels worthwhile, the economies of scale. Efficiency!
Honestly, this is how I want to live; the retreat mimics cohousing, a modern take on the old fashioned hippie-commune, more workable, less utopian, including as a central component shared cooking and dining. Alas, my wife, deeply private, would hate cohousing. I want to stay with my wife…
Anyway, after the first serving, while they are still liquid and hot, they can be poured into bread pans and popped in the fridge. Oh, you add a shitload of cheddar cheese, salt and butter to the grits too, otherwise they’re tasteless; that’s kind of the point of grits; like tofu; they taste like nothing but what you bring to them. Which is cool.
To cook, you boil salted water and feather in the grits, stirring to prevent lumping, and then you let them simmer, covered for 20-30 minutes. They’re good hot and fresh, with extra butter and salt and pepper on top; they will set up on your plate as they cool, so you don’t need a bowl, as with oatmeal or cream of wheat. Grits walk the line between liquid and solid; all deliciousness is chaos, it’s a moment of perfection, right? Fresh bread, fresh vegetables from a garden, hot soup, freezing ice cream. So much now is nitrogen cooled. Or coal-fire hot.
Time and entropy attacks food, creating buffet-line mediocrity. Leftovers. Fast food. Snack food. The pop-tart, which can never be stale because it never was fresh. Frozen waffles and bagels. Cold pizza. Gas station saran wrapped sandwiches.
So, the grits went over well. I moved maybe four cups of them. I pair them with the ‘country ham’ I buy mail order from the mountains of North Carolina, a kind of salt pork friend and eaten as bacon, with a super salty hit edged with a yeasty fermentation. This ham is so shelf stable they mail it in an envelope that arrives in your mailbox with the six copies of the Williams and Sonoma catalog.
Anyway, the real magic happens the next day, when you fry the leftovers. You de-mold them from the bread pan, and they come out perfect, a quivering glistening mass, and you slice them, maybe a quarter inch thick, carefully, as they are fragile You fry them for 20 minutes or so, ten minutes on a side. It takes forever and you should set a timer and not noodle with them too much or you’ll break them. With the embedded cheese, butter, salt, pepper, fried cheese grits are far, far superior to polenta. Crusty and brownish on the outside; they taste like fried cheese, with pop-corn notes. Inside, they are crusty and melty and warm, tough on the outside, the original grit experience now encased in an umami skin, that dissolves quickly in your mouth, hash-brown like. Perfect.
People liked them.
Took me forty years to get them right. Not sure my mother or grandmother ever made them like this. Twenty minutes frying after a day of resting and the half hour of cooking. But it’s a repurposed leftover, like the crusty french bread becoming bread pudding the next day in New Orleans. It’s free garbage food. It’s labor, not materials cost.
Oh the writing retreat? I wrote 1000 words. The group’s organizer, successful novelist, wrote 10,000. Executive function, where are you?
Mostly I made grits, drank booze, slept late, and then walked to the ocean, the rocky shore in Kennebunk, Maine, and gazed out at the blue on blue horizon and thought about my parents, my life, the books I’m struggling to write, to believe in enough to write, the secondary creation that is sometimes so potent and sometimes so elusive. And, as always, I thought about my next meal. About talking to my friends, who I haven’t seen in years. I think about time going by too fast, the way my parents bodies looked, after they died, mouths slack, eyes closed. So old. Never to eat again. No more restaurants and fine wine.
I push that thought away and think about my next meal.
About the grits I will fry.
And how fucking good they will be.
“Never to eat again.” omg what eloquence. It immediately brought me back to my own mother’s death. Never to eat again. Time is only sandwiched between each slowly savored meal. Take care of yourself.