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Grits are staging a revival
By Jim Auchmutey

If you didn't grow up on grits - and there are a lot of you that didn't - you may regard them the way Joe Pesci did in his fish-out-of- water comedy, "My Cousin Vinny." Remember the scene? A Noo Yawk lawyer, trying his first case in Wazoo City, Ala., of all places, walks into a diner and orders breakfast: eggs, bacon and a puddle of something that's too white for gravy and too smooth for oatmeal. "What's this over here?" Pesci asks. "You never heard of grits?" the cook says. "Sure," Pesci answers, carefully probing the stuff with his fork. "What is a grit anyways?"

Plenty, as it turns out.

After years of declining consumption and outright disrespect, the South's most familiar culinary punch line is staging something of a comeback. Upscale restaurants are presenting grits in fancy dinner entrees, part of the growing interest in regional cuisines. Several grits cookbooks have been published in the last couple of years, and grits are featured in a dozen others. Even health food stores sell stone-ground grits, which are, after all, a high-fiber vegetarian dish.

Brothers and sisters, it's a grits revival. And it's about time.

Maybe it's that unappetizing name, which suggests bad puns or a mouthful of Dixie dust, but grits have never gotten their due.

"People think of it as poor people's food," says Nathalie Dupree, the Atlanta cookbook author. She's constantly amazed at foodies who turn up their noses at grits then fawn over its trendy Italian cousin, polenta. "It's a kind of prejudice because grits is Southern and was never considered very chic. Every time I go into a restaurant that serves polenta, I say loudly, `Why aren't we serving grits in Atlanta, Ga.?' "

Maybe someone was listening. Grits are simmering in some of the city's best kitchens these days.

At the sleek Buckhead Diner, grits have joined polenta on the menu in items such as pork chops over cheese grits. At South City Kitchen, a hot new restaurant in Midtown, they ladle scallops and shrimp over incredibly rich creamy grits. At Bones, the Buckhead steakhouse, they thought enough of their grits fritters to take them to this year's Best of Atlanta restaurant expo.

It's as if chefs have discovered what Southern cooks have long known: Whether you serve them with eggs, shrimp or chicken gravy, grits are great soppin' food.

Bones chef Greg Gammage says he's tried a hundred grits recipes. "New South cuisine is where it's at, and grits is a big part of that."

Grits have been briefly fashionable before, as you surely remember. When Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale were elected on the Gritz and Fritz ticket in 1976, Washington fell all over itself to act Southern, and more than a few restaurants slapped grits on the menu like they were some foreign novelty.

The fad masked a trend, however: Americans were growing too busy for breakfast. Grits consumption declined through the '70s and '80s, according to Quaker Oats, which makes 80 percent of the grits sold in the United States. It was getting to where you actually had to ask for grits with breakfast in the Deep South, lamented John Egerton in his 1987 book, "Southern Food."

Starting in the late '80s, though, grits-eating began edging back up. Perhaps it was curiosity about low-fat, high-carb grain dishes in general. Perhaps it was the economic times that made inexpensive staples attractive. Or perhaps Southerners are simply rediscovering the bowl of their birthright.

"It's Southerners who are eating more grits," says Susan Shields, product group manager for regional grains with Quaker Oats. "We don't try to convert Northerners. If a person doesn't grow up eating grits, they're not going to eat a grit."

Actually, grits are less a Southern phenomenon than a Deep Southern phenomenon. Three-quarters of the grits sold in the United States are bought in a belt of coastal states stretching from Louisiana to the Carolinas. You can certainly find grits in the upland South and in pockets of Northern cities populated by ex-Southerners, but not like you can find them in Charleston or New Orleans, where dishes like Grits and Shrimp and Grits and Grillades (braised veal) are traditions.

In the Deep South, grits are elemental. As Bill Neal and David Perry put it in their "Good Old Grits Cookbook" (Workman, $6.95): Without 'em, "the sun wouldn't come up, the crops wouldn't grow, and most of us would lose our drawl."

The down side of this regional specificity is that grits lovers often have trouble finding grits outside the South. Martha White Foods, the Nashville company that makes Jim Dandy grits, the nation's second best-selling brand, is always hearing pleas from expatriates with homesick tastebuds.

"I talked to a man yesterday who wanted to know where to buy grits in Cincinnati," says Linda Carman, Martha White's consumer affairs director. "I told him we didn't sell there, and he said he was 82 years old and probably wouldn't live much longer and really wanted some grits like he used to eat in Alabama. What a guilt trip - I had to send him some."

Between them, Quaker Oats and Martha White make almost all the grits sold. They come in three varieties: regular (boils in 20 minutes), quick (five minutes) and instant (alas, the fastest-growing segment).

But it's a sliver of the market, stone-ground grits, that's drawing most of the culinary interest. Chefs prefer stone-ground - coarser corn ground slowly at a gristmill - because it retains more flavor and texture. Elizabeth Terry, whose Savannah restaurant, Elizabeth on 37th Street, pioneered New Southern cooking, has been serving stone-ground grits for years. "I get them in 50-pound bags from a health-food store," she says. "People are paying more attention to grains, like polenta and couscous, and grits goes along with that."

If Terry's restaurant represents the upper end of the grits revival, what are we to make of the goings-on at the World Grits Festival? Every April for the past eight years, thousands of pilgrims have crowded into the small town of St. George, S.C., which claims to swallow more grits per capita than any other place in the world. Visitors can see the Grits- Eating Contest, the Grits Roll (in which competitors dive into a trough of grits) and the Grits Parade (featuring the Grits Sisters, a local bridge club that rides a float and tosses packages of instant grits to the crowd).

And if they're daring enough, visitors can sample dozens of grits concoctions that people send from all over the South to compete in the World Grits Festival Recipe Contest. There's a stomach-spinning imagination at work here; recent entries have included Aloha Grits, Pistachio Grits Pilaf and Thai Grilled Chicken Grits Salad.

Perhaps no one has taken grits to the extremes that Atlantan Diane Pfeifer has. In her cookbook, "Gone With the Grits," she leads grits on a world tour with 128 recipes for dishes such as Burr-Grit-Os, Chinese Sweet 'N' Sour Grits and Gritt-U-Corni Alfredo. (Did we mention she likes puns?) Her homily on hominy has sold almost 25,000 copies.

Pfeifer, a St. Louis native, was not born to the grits faith. But she learned to love the dish, as revealed by Dunk'N Dine, when she moved here 20 years ago. Remarkably, every recipe in her grits book is vegetarian.

"It's an incredibly versatile grain with a fascinating texture," Pfeifer says. "I love to bake with it. Grits give cakes a moist, pudding texture. But you have to be careful. I tried some drop cookies, and the grits dehydrated; it was like eating Daytona Beach."

All this effort to gussy up grits unsettles some people. Edna Lewis, author of several books on Southern food, was reared on grits in Virginia and enjoys fixing them with shrimp paste. But she wishes grits wouldn't become - dare we say? - trendy.

She remembers seeing an interesting presentation of grits at a New York dinner: They were chilled, cut out with a cookie cutter and reheated with red pepper, asparagus and mushrooms. The result struck her as more handiwork than food. "It looked pretty, but I couldn't try it. Too nouvelle," she says. "To me, grits are grits, and they're great just the way they are."

Of course, not everyone agrees.

Like many restaurants in Charleston, Magnolias serves its tourist- heavy clientele several grits entrees, including Grilled Salmon over Grits, and Spicy Shrimp and Sausage Grits. "Most people, if they know grits, know it from that watery, tasteless mush you get out of instant grits," says chef/owner Donald Barickman. "So I try to show them grits doesn't have to be like that. We convert most of them. But some people just won't try them. They think grits has something to do with hog intestines. I guess they're confusing grits with chitlins."

Not even grits can overcome that.

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