Why we love shrimp and grits, what we look for in a great plate, and a few words worth getting straight.
Our take
Why we love it
Shrimp and grits is humble comfort food, yet it's deceptively simple. It sounds easy: a base of grits with shrimp on top. But it's easy to ruin and hard to perfect. When a cook takes real care with each part, it can be a revelation.
Start with the grits. Basic grits can be boring. Industrial, machine-processed grits lose nearly all of their texture and flavor, and that's by design: it's what makes them shelf-stable. Bland dust in a cardboard can. Stone-ground grits, the ones ground the old-fashioned way, take much more time and effort not only to produce but also to cook properly. The reward is that they keep their corn flavor, excellent texture, and more of the grain's nutrition.
Then there are the shrimp. Cooked perfectly, they have an incredible sweetness and texture that put lobster to shame any day of the week. That takes perfect timing and technique. Overcooked shrimp turn rubbery and disappointing. The window is tiny, and it closes fast when you're working on the sauce that brings it all together. Local Lowcountry shrimp, like any wild-caught product, are even less forgiving. But they're well worth the extra fuss.
The sauce needs to highlight both the shrimp and the grits without overshadowing either. In the earliest recipes, it was just butter and pepper. Since then, it has grown more elaborate, and even the finest French-trained chefs can struggle to get it right. It usually has some American pork, such as bacon, country ham, tasso, smoked sausage, or andouille, along with aromatic vegetables and herbs. It can be a roux-based gravy, or cream, or simply a Southern "tomato gravy." But it can't break, it can't be too thick or lumpy, and it certainly cannot be oversalted.
Exceptional shrimp and grits can be the most elegant ballet, danced to the most talented orchestra. It's the dance and the harmony that get us. It's a grand analogy for such a humble dish. No detail can be taken for granted.
Comfort food works when it doesn't try to do too much. The best is made with love, often by somebody's grandmother. You can take a humble dish and lift it without going far from where it started. It's hard to define, but you know it when you taste it.
The plate
What we look for
A traditional American Lowcountry plate has simply prepared grits, not grit cakes and not fried. The shrimp are small to medium, enough of them to show up in most bites, tails off, and sautéed in the sauce. Foreign ingredients and flavors may make an excellent dish, but they don't belong on the traditional plate. If cheese is in the dish, it belongs worked into the sauce or the grits, not sprinkled on top. That's better for the plate and better for presentation.
A non-traditional plate earns its place when it keeps those same fundamentals with different ingredients. We've had one with harissa butter and snap peas that we'd recommend to anyone, though it isn't the plate we'd send a visitor who wants shrimp and grits in its purest form.
Again, deceptively simple. Easy to ruin and hard to perfect. The same recipe in the same kitchen does not guarantee the same plate. Even our longtime favorites have let us down on a return visit, which is why we track grades over time instead of trusting memory or reputation.
Plain answers
Words worth knowing
What is a grit, anyways?
Vinny asks over breakfast in My Cousin Vinny (1992)
Grits are dried corn, ground coarse and simmered until creamy. How they're ground makes all the difference. Stone-ground grits are milled slowly between stones from the whole kernel, so they keep the germ, the oily heart of the corn, where much of the flavor lives. They taste like corn, they have real texture, and they keep more of the grain's nutrition. They also take longer to cook, and they don't keep: the same oils that provide the flavor go rancid in a few months, which is why the good ones come with "store in freezer" on the bag. Industrial steel mills strip out the germ and the hull on purpose, which makes the grits uniform, quick to cook, and shelf-stable. It also strips out most of the flavor and texture, which is why store-bought grits are usually enriched with vitamins to put some nutrition back. Stone-ground comes in two types: quick, ground finer and ready in about 15 to 20 minutes with no soak, and coarse, the long-cooking kind that does better after an overnight soak. We'll take stone-ground every time.
Quaker Old Fashioned grits beside Anson Mills stone-ground yellow quick (medium ground), white, and blue coarse-ground grits. The Anson Mills bags all read "Store in Freezer."
What is the Lowcountry?
The low, marshy coast of the Southeast, where live oaks hang with Spanish moss and tidal creeks fill and empty twice a day. The smell of salt air and pluff mud tells you where you are. It runs from the south end of the Grand Strand, past Charleston, Beaufort, and Savannah, and down the Sea Islands to Amelia Island, Florida. The Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, which follows the same coast by its people and traditions, runs a little farther, to Jacksonville.
The Lowcountry coast and its major rivers. The shading fades inland because nobody draws that edge in exactly the same place.
Look at the rivers. The Pee Dee, Santee, Cooper, Edisto, Savannah, Ogeechee, and Altamaha all run down out of the uplands, slow across the flat coastal plain, and spill into marsh and tidal creeks before they reach the Atlantic. Shrimp spawn offshore, and the young drift into those shallow, brackish creeks, where the marsh grass feeds and shelters them for a few months before they head back out on the tide. That meeting of river and sea is a big part of why shrimp are so plentiful here.
Shrimp and grits comes out of a convergence. Native corn foodways gave us grits. The creeks and sounds gave us shrimp. And enslaved Africans, whose skill shaped Lowcountry cooking, brought the knowledge that tied it together. That history is built on slavery, and we won't skip it. Their descendants, the Gullah Geechee people, kept that culture alive and have done great things with it, and this dish is part of that. It all came together in the kitchens and at the tables of the European households that held those cooks. The Chronicle tells the full story.
