The Grits Grammar War in Three Part Hominy -- Part II

In Part I, posted June 14, we asked the question: “Is they or are they?” Grits, that is. The answer remained unclear. To continue. . .

Craig Claiborne, originally from Mississippi, became one of the King’s of Culinary America and food editor for The New York Times. He was a grits heavyweight and weighed in on the Grits Grammar War, taking a firm stand on whether grits is/are singular/plural. In an August 23, 1976, Times piece, in which his Southern and writing good manners show in his refusal to refer to himself as I, Craig Claiborne, took his stand. Notice also what a gentleman he is.

Compare his demeanor to that of blowhard Rush Limbaugh, who in my opinion, may be behind this resurgence of the Grits War as a way of defaming the Obama’s and getting revenge on the Dems for naming him head of the GOP. The subject can be polarizing. Claiborne wrote:

(We) felt notably secure in stating recently that grits, that celebrated Southern cereal, constituted a plural noun. We staunchly defend this opinion; but we do feel moved to give the opposition a moment of self defense. We heard from a fellow Mississippian, who shall go nameless as follows:

“I wonder whether you [Craig Claiborne] have quietly fallen victim of a Yankee malaise, one which causes even editors of dictionaries, alas, to refer to grits as a plural noun. . . . [You need to] come back home where grits is IT, not them. Do Yankees refer to those oatmeal? Does one eat one grit or many? Isn’t it supposed at least by tradition, to be a singularly singular noun? Please say it’s so.”

Scoreboard

One for are and one for is. The unnamed source from Mississippi has a point: I am diligently searching the dictionaries, style manuals, and grammar books in my spare time for the answer so that you don’t have to; I’ll reveal the answer as it reveals itself.

Remember, by the way, “cain’t” is a very Southern way of saying “can’t.” Northerners will probably get used to that about the time they get used to grits.

Is/are grits a collective noun or do you look under “Plurals” in stylebooks and manuals? Since Claiborne wrote for The New York Times, let’s start there.

Style Manuals

The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, Allan M. Siegal and William G. Connolly. Times Books, 1999.

Under “number of subject and verb,” pgs. 234-235: Sums of money are usually treated as singular because the focus is on the sum. . . . Ten dollars buys less now than five did then.

Aside: I wonder when “then” was back in 1999! Does ten dollars still buy less now in the Recession than five did then? I wonder if “then” might be ten years later, or NOW, 2009!

Under “Plurals,” p. 262: Some words that are plural in form have singular meanings: measles; news. They take singular verbs.

But then the manual gives a couple of words ending in s that can be either singular or plural, depending on use, like ethics and politics. I guess it stands to reason, since politics is/are so confusing anyway. So, no score from here.

A Tie and a Recipe

So far it’s tied. This is a good place to pause with a great Claiborne soup and grits recipe before going on to more style manuals, dictionaries, and grammar books in Part III coming soon.

In a March 2, 1967, New York Times piece, Claiborne recounted visiting with a Montgomery, Ala., “stately matron,” Mrs. Wiley Hill, Jr., in her Southern mansion where she served She-crab and Lobster Soup paired with Grits Soufflé.

She-crab and Lobster Soup

4 cups Italian style plum tomatoes 1 cup shelled green peas

1 cup milk 2 cups heavy cream

1 pound lump crab meat one-and-one-half-pound lobster, cooked

Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste Cayenne pepper to taste

¼ teaspoon powdered ginger 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

½ cup plus 6 tablespoons dry sherry wine 6 tablespoons whipped cream

Paprika Finely chopped parsley

1. Cook the tomatoes over moderate heat until reduced to a paste, about 30 minutes, stirring frequently to prevent sticking and burning.

2. Cook peas in salted water to cover until tender. Put through a sieve or food mill and add to tomatoes.

3. Add milk, cream and crab meat. Remove all meat from lobster shell and cut into bite-size pieces. Add to stew. Add salt, pepper, cayenne, ginger, Worcestershire sauce. Cook over low heat, stirring frequently, one hour. Add one-half cup sherry.

4. When ready to serve, add one tablespoon sherry to each of six heated soup bowls. Ladle soup over and garnish each serving with a tablespoon of whipped cream sprinkled with paprika and parsley.

Grits Soufflé

2 cups milk 4 cups grits, cooked according to package direction and cooled to room temperature

Salt to taste 8 eggs, separated

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

2. Bring the milk just to a boil and stir into grits. Add salt. Beat egg yolks and stir into grits mixture.

3. Whip the whites until stiff and fold into mixture. Butter a two-quart baking dish that is not more than six inches high, and pour mixture into it. Set the dish in a pan of hot water and bake 45 minutes to an hour. Serve immediately.

The search for an answer to the grammar mystery and a Cajun grits recipe will be coming soon.

In the meantime, we will raise our grits to America on its 2009 Birthday in the next post.

 

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The Grits Grammar War in Three Parts Hominy – Part I

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Is they or are they? Grits, I mean.

The Grits Grammar War (see the May 4 post “First Food for First Family”) can polarize language pundits and mavens into two extreme camps with no grey area in between: Grits is a singular noun, like news, which is a something made up of a bunch of pieces, ends in s, but acts as one something. So, “News is a staple of the American information junkie.”

And, “Grits is a breakfast staple in the South.” Grits just looks plural. That’s merely perception.

“Hell no,” says the other extreme. We’re dealing with reality, not perception. The word grits is a plural noun. You can plainly see that: it ends in s because grits are made up of lots of pieces. It’s like measles and scissors, one thing ending in s that is composed of more than one. You cain’t have just one – a grit, a measle, or a scissor. Plural, plain and simple.

By the way, “cain’t” is a very Southern way of saying “can’t.” Northerners will probably get used to that about the time they get used to grits.

This Grammar War was likely ignited unknowingly when FLOTUS Michelle Obama let the cornmeal out of the bag during a kitchen tour before a state dinner the same night as the 2009 Oscars. She told one of the culinary students that the White House chef cooked up some “mean waffles and grits.” Show time for grits.

Pre-emptive Poles

Those grits mavens at the is pole and at the are pole say, “You’re either with us or against us.” That attitude is what issue-polarizing is made of. So, maybe Rush Limbaugh is behind revitalizing the Grits Grammar War. By the looks of him, he’s also trying to corner the grits market. Truth outs.

Creating polarity on the grits issue could be an attempt to discredit and dishonor the Obama’s good name; it is not just a little more subtle that saying, “I hope he fails!”  Limbaugh could also be getting revenge for the Dems calling him the de facto head of the GOP, probably an attempt to make an end-run around any credible leader.

The irony, of course, is that this Grits Grammar War raged for a while in The New York Times, with food guru Craig Claiborne at the center. I suppose this fact could indicate a left-wing conspiracy.

So maybe James Carville is stirring things up, suggesting that laughing at GRITS is tantamount to assaulting the Southern Way of Life. This way, Southerners by the droves would run to the Democratic Party.

More on this conflict in the next Grits Grammar War post.

Meanwhile, what the heck is/are grits?

Lye Grits

Cornmeal is ground corn; hominy is/are dried, hulled corn kernels; grits is/are finely ground hominy. You have to boil grits in water to make a kind of porridge; you used to be able to buy #2 cans of hominy, but I don’t know if you still can. I will find out my next trip to Piggly Wiggly.

“Hulled” is the key word in how to deal with hominy. Southerners of a certain age are aware of what might be considered a disgusting method for hulling hominy – with Red Devil lye. (Ooops, bad news, lyers

  

Craig Claiborne, originally from Mississippi, knew about whole hominy kernels long before he became one of the Kings of Culinary America and food editor for The New York Times, as detailed in a June 23, 1982 New York Times piece.

I have an old-fashioned recipe for the preparation of whole hominy, sometimes referred to as lye hominy. It is attributed to the cookbook of Mrs. J.W.T. Faulkner, grandmother of William Faulkner. It begins, “Take 2 or 3 quarts of large (kernel) dried corn and put it in a large iron pot with a pint of strong lye.” You boil it “all day” until the “eye” comes off. That is a perfectly valid recipe; many others call for soaking the dried corn in a liquid containing wood ash; in “The Joy of Cooking” Irma Rombauer explains the wood ash as an attempt to give hominy calcium value.

Gross.

Claiborne wanted to convince Northerners that whole hominy and grits are delectable and worth looking into. “In that they all derive from the same base - dried kernels of corn, whole or ground - it is scarcely surprising that they team notably well with grated cheese and chilies,” he wrote.

Here’s Claiborne’s cheese and chilies recipe, which he suggests pairs with his grillades very well.

Craig Claiborne’s Cheese Grits Casserole

2-½ cups water

½ cup grits, preferably stone-ground.

Salt to taste

2 cups grated sharp cheddar cheese

½ teaspoon garlic, minced fine

3 tablespoons (more or less to taste) jalapeno pepper, chopped fine

4 eggs, lightly beaten

2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce.

1. Bring water to boil in saucepan and gradually add grits, stirring. Add salt to taste. Cover and cook about 25 minutes.

2. Meanwhile, preheat oven to 350 degrees.

3. 3. Add 1-3/4 cups of cheese to the grits and stir. Add garlic, pepper, eggs and Worcestershire. Blend well.

4. Pour mixture into a two-quart casserole and sprinkle top with remaining one-quarter cup of cheese. Place in oven and bake 25 minutes.

In addition to his great grits recipes, he took a firm stand on the grits grammatical correctness issue. We will dissect this correctness in posts to come.

No Spitting on the Premises

 

_©

Nice people simply do not spit. Common people spit.

“Nice People” is outdated Southernspeak for people from “nice families”; “nice families” is outdated Southernspeak for those whose background passes muster, whose genealogy goes back a long way, which is far more important than money unless your money goes back a long way.

Common people are those who have no upbringing. When they say “nice, white, rice,” the “nice” rhymes with “ass,” the “white” rhymes with “brat,” and the “rice” rhymes with . . ., well, I’m not really sure. It’s country-fied.

“Tacky” is Southernspeak for, among other criticisms, nouveau riche people who have no taste. Their “people,” who were probably Yankees, might go back one generation at the most. These ancestors probably did spit.

But smart Southern women of a certain age, even those from nice families, have likely resorted to “spittin’ grits” at some point in the past. I have.

In 1965 after college, I was driving in La Jolla, California, on some jaunt or other. Even though I had grown up as an Air Force officer’s brat and lived all over, I still had my Southern accent and I had never been to California. I was driving the wrong way on a four-lane one-way street at night. How tacky.

Not very far into this stupid maneuver, I saw the flashing lights of a police car that had made a U-turn and was behind me. I have no memory of where I pulled over. It must have been into a service station lot, one where your gas was pumped for you, your oil was check for you, and for dessert your windshield was cleaned for you.

I remember thinking, “You’d better start spittin’ grits ASAP.” The cop leaned down.

I said, “Good evenin’ suh. Ah know what Ah’ve done hea-uh (here), but Ah’ve nev-uh been to Califon-yuh.”

You add to that verbal sprawl your fluttering eyelashes and a big smile. You morph into a combination of Scarlet O’Hara and a Valley Girl. I didn’t get a ticket.

Spirit and Image of Grits

But I damned well wouldn’t resort to such trickery now. First, it’s against my principles. (Yeh, right, lady.)

Second, the idea of a 65-year-old Southern woman (who is myself) spittin’, grits is grotesque. Plus I’m a grandmother from a nice family.

Third, the Southern accent, like so much else distinctively Southern, has become watered down by all the moving around people do these days -- except for grits, which you indeed water down and which is the subject of another post.

“Spittin’ grits might not have to be such a crass, unladylike phrase after all. In my 1987 edition of The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins says that “spittin’ image” could be a corruption of “spirit and image.” This means, of course, that “spittin’ grits” is in the spirit and image of Southern niceties. (http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-37073764_ITM).

There. That’s solved.

Except For This Part

Fourth, my father used the phrase, not as a Southern nicety but very specifically. When I was 14 and 15, in junior high school at Bellingrath in Montgomery, Alabama, in the mid-1950s, we went to Sock Hops. I am not making this up.

My father, an Air Force officer and pilot of jets, was an imposing Southern gentleman, stationed at Maxwell A.F.B. and an Alabama native. We were not allowed to ride unchaperoned in cars with boys, not even to Sock Hops. That policy put quite a damper on “dating,” which was probably the real intention of the policy. Anyway, I had been asked to this Sock Hop by this boy I was nuts over.

Dad said to me, “Young lady, you are not going out with that boy unless his parents are driving, and that’s THAT. I am not spittin’ grits!”

I knew the dreamboat’s parents weren’t going to be driving. He and his friends were 16 and already at Lanier High School. I promised dad the parents would be driving. I sneaked, snunck, or whatever the verb tense is.

We had not been at the Hop more than 30 minutes when my 6-foot 3-inch dad marched in, got me by the arm, and marched me out.

He was not one for Spittin’ Grits.

NOTE: There will be no post tomorrow. I will be at a reunion.