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| Shrimp and Grits from Basnight's Lone Cedar |
Grits
with bugs. Conjures up those
fly-in-your-face pantry moths when you open up grains, doesn’t? But grits with bugs is how the
old-timers on the Outer Banks would have described the iconic dish of Shrimp
and Grits - had they ever eaten it back in the day.
Asked
to speak about Shrimp and Grits at Sunday’s Brunch at the Day at the Docks in
Hatteras a couple of weekends ago, I posed this to some older Bankers: “Did you grow up eating shrimp and
grits?”
“Naw. We had fried fish for breakfast. Or grits with runny eggs. But not shrimp and grits.” And, it turns out that hardly
anyone did outside of the Low Country of South Carolina, until 1985, when The NY
Times published an article written by a homesick Southerner, Craig Claiborne, a
Mississipian by birth.
Claiborne headed south to Chapel
Hill to check out the dishes he’d heard about coming from the kitchen of
Crook’s Corner. Bill Neal, owner
and chef, was among the first to plan his menu around seasonal and regional
ingredients. Neal was a rural
South Carolina boy who settled in the Triangle after graduating from Duke
University. He’d left both his
wife and their restaurant, La Residence, which as its name implies, had a more
French-influenced menu and style of preparation. Neal took the techniques he had learned and used Southern
foods from his childhood at his new place, Crook’s Corner. It had no white linen tablecloths, but
it did have a pink pig on the roof.
Clairborne was intrigued with
Neal’s take on Southern foods, so he placed his big self on a stool in Neal’s
kitchen and took notes. After the
recipe for Neal’s Shrimp and Grits appeared, the dish took off quicker than you
can burn garlic, appearing on menus especially across the South. Northern restaurants had grits shipped
from the southern mills and shrimp from up and down the Southeast coast. Thus, the icon was born.
PLACE OF ORIGIN
Bill
Neal gets a lot of credit for Shrimp and Grits, but he was cooking from an old
cookbook from the 1950s, CHARLESTON RECEIPTS. As the recipe header noted, “Breakfast Shrimp” was a long-time
breakfast favorite in the coastal region, what is referred to as the Low
Country of South Carolina. That recipe called for cooking the shrimp in bacon
grease, with a bit of onion and green pepper added. A little bit of tomato catsup and Worcestershire sauce was
added.
But
it turns out that recipe was a gussied up version of a “poor man’s
breakfast.” Like other folks who
live off the land, folks in the rural Low Country fed themselves with whatever
they had on hand. They sold the
larger shrimp caught by nets and kept the small shrimp for their own consumption. Like my grandmother, they kept a
metal can of bacon grease on the stovetop, which they used to sauté the
shrimp. They added pieces of
bacon, or ham scraps, if they had any, but not tasso ham, because they were not
Cajun. They didn’t use butter,
because it was too precious if hand-churned and hard to keep in the hot
Southern summers. Herbs and cheese?
Naw.
Bill
Neal’s version is a nice riff on that basic Low Country, poor man’s breakfast,
using bacon, sliced mushrooms and scallions with a little garlic and lemon
juice. And he served it over
boiled grits, as the folks in Charleston did, except they called them “hominy
grits.”
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SO WHAT EXACTLY ARE GRITS?
Here
in the Grits Belt, from North Carolina down on through Louisiana, some say
Texas, too, you can find three types of grits.
All
grits come from dried corn. Duh.
Then it’s ground. Double Duh.
Well,
the Charlestonians call their grits “hominy grits,” a name derived from a
Native American term, “rockahomine.”
Native Americans made these types of grits from dried corn kernels that
are treated with “lye,” an alkali they made by running water through
ashes. Why? Because it would remove the outer hull,
leaving a white puff of corn that they would dry, again. It could then be stored and used whole,
in a stew, like the New Mexican posole.
Or, the dried puff could be ground into HOMINY GRITS.
Interestingly,
it was this process of using lye that prevented the Native Americans from suffering
from pellagra, a niacin-deficiency that Europeans developed because they ate
relatively nothing but corn during some mighty lean years. The lye process changes the structure
of the starch. How smart the New
World natives were!
The
type of grits most restaurants and good home cooks use today are stone-ground
grits. And here’s the thing - they’re
nothing new under the sun. For centuries, farmers and homesteaders have dried
corn, then ground it between two large stones. Stone-ground grits are the best tasting because they retain
that outer hull, and the inner hull as well. It’s the oils in the inner hull, especially, that add the
most flavor to these kinds of grits, and the reason they can go rancid without
storing them in the fridge.
The
other type of grits is hardly worth mentioning. They’re the packaged, commercially ground “Quick Grits”
available on most grocery store shelves. After both outer and inner hulls have been removed, the dried
corn kernels are pulverized with steel rollers. But that removes all flavor, and much of the richer
texture. It’s like the grated,
dried and flavorless Parmesan cheese that comes in that big green box, versus a
hunk of real Parmesan that’s held tight while grating it over your pasta.
SO WHY NO SHRIMP AND GRITS IN THE OUTER BANKS?
Shrimping
is a huge industry on the Outer Banks today. Ou?r barrier islands create a version of the Low Country, with
inner sounds filled with marsh grass and shallow waters.
So
why did no one I asked remember eating shrimp and grits while growing up?
Here’s
an astonishing fact: It wasn’t
until the 1930s that folks in the Outer Banks ate shrimp. Truly! They did not eat shrimp!
“My
grandmother thought they were worms,” said Della Basnight, a Manteo native. “She wouldn’t eat them. Thought we were crazy. They were bugs,
for God’s sake.”
“I
could see them in the ocean grass while I was out fishing,” said my buddy John
Gaskill, age 96. “But when I left
Wanchese (for the Navy) in 1933, we weren’t eating shrimp. We thought they were bugs.”
Shrimp
nestle in the mud, and fouled up nets when Outer Bankers dragged the sounds for
fish.
So
here’s the Great Circle of Life as far as Shrimp and Grits go. Outer Banks fishermen would pluck those
nasty “bugs” out of their nets and plop them into barrels. Then, when they got over to the
mainland, they traded those stinky barrels of shrimp for barrels of corn. It was a win-win, for the farmers used
them as fertilizer, and the Bankers dried the corn, sometimes on old sails
spread on roofs or bushes. After
stripping the dried kernels from the cobs, they would take them to one of the
dozen windmills that dotted the Outer Banks.
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| Replica at the Island Farm on Roanoke Island |
Think
about it: Couldn’t do gravity flow
mills using creeks or water wheels on the flat beaches, now could you? So they built German post-style
windmills, that could be turned to face whichever way the wind was
blowing. The blades of the
windmill could be covered with sails, so as to better control the speed of the
turning stones. If the mill got
going too fast, the stones would scorch the corn. The summertime breeze was sometimes nonexistent, so the
sails helped there, too. And so
that’s how the Outer Banks got their cornmeal and grits – sometimes traded for
“bugs” or shrimp.
SHRIMPING HITS THE BANKS
Native Americans ate shrimp, say archaeologists. But European settlers were a little
slow in catching on to this succulent protein from the sea. Like with the blackened red fish craze,
folks in the New Orleans area introduced the rest of the new settlers in
America to eating shrimp. Records
show that in 1735, seine nets were ordered from France fishermen from New
Orleans. They dried the shrimp in
the sun, as the Chinese and Mexicans had for centuries.
Southport,
near Wilmington, was the first seaport in North Carolina to build a shrimp
cannery in the first decades of the 1900s. Diesel engines, adapted for boats, played a huge role,
allowing the use of “otter trawls” rather than a large seine net that could
only be used in shallow waters.
Then ice became readily available from ice plants. The small island where the Roanoke
Island Festival Park is today was once called “Ice Plant Island.”
Some
fishermen left Wanchese, the big fishing village even today on the Outer Banks,
and headed to the Gulf of Mexico during the 1930s to learn how to shrimp. When they began pulling nets for shrimp,
they were called “bug hunters” along the coast of North Carolina.
The
shrimp industry steadily grew from just a couple hundred of thousand pounds in
1931, to more than 10 million pounds caught in the wild each year today, making
it NC’s largest seafood industry.
TODAY’S SHRIMP AND GRITS
Check
out the menus in many of the restaurants that dot the Outer Banks, and you’ll
find their version of Shrimp and Grits.
Some will be served with cheese grits, some with creamy grits and
creamy, thick sauce with the shrimp, and some with have wild mushrooms or
roasted garlic or diced tomatoes.
Most feature andouille sausage or smoked bacon.
Even
though the dish has no culinary history on the Outer Banks, let’s claim them
anyway. After all, we’ve got
shrimp – those bugs that used to foul up nets – and we had grits, thanks to
windmills and barrels of stinky shrimp.
Hatteras Island chef and Seaside innkeeper, Chris Latimer, created a marvelous Shrimp and Grits for the Days at the Docks brunch, using fresh Pamlico shrimp from fishmonger Jeff Aiken, along with andouille sausage, roasted garlic and fresh bell peppers prepared in a deep, dark roux. Fresh, stone-ground grits were donated by Carolina Grits & Co of Rocky Mount. What a marvelous treat!
Saved the red cooking liquid. Added it to vinegar, onions, and spices. Brought it to a boil then simmered for about five minutes, until the onion was translucent. Let it cool for a bit, about 10 minutes.
