Confusion remains the norm even now, hundreds of years later. The problem today is that hardly any of what’s sold as “wild rice” in this country is actually wild any more. Sad but true, something like 90 percent of the product sold from supermarket shelves and cooked in restaurant kitchens is actually an odd cultivated (that’s right, not wild) cousin. While the latter probably isn’t genetically modified, it easily could be. The total truth is that the real thing—really wild wild rice—and what amounts to a commercial counterfeit—have almost nothing in common other than a modestly shared appearance and half a name. It’s some sort of agro-culinary silliness without the soul. The commercial bastardization of the authentic article is basically baseless. I’m sure at some out of touch (and out of tune) level, the people who did the work to make it happen were nice enough. But those who grow it, have, I think ended up in a situation that is akin to marketing goldfish (crackers) as wild salmon. The shape and color are kind of the similar and the word “fish” is on the label of each, but beyond that . . . you tell me?

Just to get the point across again before I move on to the more positive part of this—telling you about how great the real stuff really is—Jim Northrup, author of Rez Road has sworn off even using the name wild rice. He says it’s been so degraded as to be basically banned from his conversation and his regular newspaper column. Instead he’ll only use the Ojibwe word for it, Manoonmin. He also told me that on the reservation in Minnesota, the cultivated paddy grown stuff from California is known as “driveway rice”—you can use it, he says, like rock salt on the road when it gets slippery.

By contrast is honestly probably one of the world’s most spiritually-sound, culinarily-compelling, historically-interesting foods. There are, of course, many others and I’m not trying to rank them. I just merely want to continue to convey how special really wild wild rice is. As I said above, really wild wild rice is not actually rice—it’s an aquatic grass that’s native to much of the northern part of North America. Having had its habitat encroached upon by the sprawl of modern cities and pollution problems, it’s now mostly found in Minnesota (some still here in Michigan, the Aanii State) and then a good bit up in Canada. It grows (this is the real stuff, not the substitute) on the lakes and rivers and is harvested every year in late summer or early autumn depending on the sun and other good stuff like that.

Really wild wild rice is still totally hand gathered—two humans, a canoe, one long pole to push, two sticks to “knock” the rice into the front of the canoe, one “Creator” (to use the Ojibwe term), a little luck, and a good bit of skill. Ricers have their secret spots in the same way fly fisherfolk do. The “green” rice is gathered, parched, husked, winnowed and dried for storage. Unlike the pseudo stuff (which takes upwards of an hour to cook and still isn’t really done—see the Jim Northrup quote in the Guide to Good Eating) the real thing is actually incredibly convenient. It’s an enormous amount of work to gather and get ready to eat, but once we buy it, it’s actually naturally fast once you get it into the kitchen. Just put it in boiling water and simmer with some salt for about 15-20 minutes (times vary depending on the lake and the vintage), drain and eat.

Honestly I kind of like to eat it just like that. Simple. Delicious. It’s nutty, its nice. It’s subtly earthy. Beautifully in balance and extremely clean, with a lovely long finish. So yeah . . . I really kind of just like it the way it is, either as a main course, or on the side with most anything else. But I wouldn’t be a good Ojibwe-phile if I didn’t like to dress it with either a bit of hot bacon fat or, alternatively, some maple sugar (or syrup, which is, of course, just maple sugar with more liquid left in). In fact, it’s actually good with a bit of both; I guess it’s an Ojibwe alternative to a bacon and pancake breakfast.

On top of all that, really wild wild rice is a very healthy food. Look it up online—I’ll spare you the nutritional details here since space is short. It’s also an enormously important element in Ojibwe history, culture, religion and economics, all in one amazing, native American (or Native American depending on how you want to hear the word) food. I just ate a little bowlful for my midday snack and I’m totally satiated.

In the moment, I’m eating the stuff we have at the Roadhouse which came, literally, from Jim Northrup’s personal stash from this past summer’s “ricing.” I can’t really tell you that a great writer’s rice is necessarily going to be better than any other ricer’s, but Jim’s been ricing for nearly six decades now, and at least I think Jim’s is exceptionally delicious.

I won’t say that I’m addicted to this bread because I’m sure I could live ok without it. Plus “addiction” is probably better applied to stuff like chocolate or . . . but damn, if this bread doesn’t just keep growing on me. The longer we make it, the more I taste it, the more I like it. If I’m not careful this is going supplant Farm as my favorite bread. I know I’m not alone because more and more regular customer and crew have been telling me much the same thing. Somewhat ironically it’s been very popular amongst many Europeans who, although the recipe is all American, go for the high density and high flavor of the bread. In the last week I’ve had a Dutchman, a German and a Czech all come calling for it. I shared these thoughts just last night with a long time and very loyal customer, and she immediately shot back, “It is MY favorite!”

Two hundred years ago Roadhouse bread would have been as everyday an event in New England as a baguettes would be today in Paris. But while so many traditional breads have made big comebacks this one remains our little culinary secret—hardly anyone out of this area other than Ann Arbor expats and Zingerman’s Mail Order customers has still even heard of it. Back in the spring of ’03 when we were working on American foods to get ready to open the Roadhouse I’d barely even heard it either. And yet there it was, right in every old American cookbook. A bread that most everyone seems to have baked at home in the 19th century that, best I could tell, wasn’t being made anywhere any more by anyone in any sort of commercial setting that I know about.

Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about it in “Little House on the Prairie,” marking its by-then-national prominence in the second half of the 19th century. What we’re making at the Bakehouse is pretty much done as it was two hundred years ago from a blend of cornmeal, rye, and wheat, sweetened with a touch of molasses. If they’d had their druthers, the colonists were very clear that they’d have been baking bread made only from wheat. But in the early days after their arrival wheat was hard to get and rather costly—poor families typically reserved it for special occasions or ornamental elements of their baking, like the top layer of a pie or pot pie crust. Rye and cornmeal were cheaper and more readily available so those were used to bake with everyday. Molasses—commonly used by colonists near ports trafficking in the rum trade with the Caribbean Islands—was the most common sweetener (along with maple syrup).

Anyways, on to the flavor, which, as I’ve already said, I think is really ridiculously good. The kind of “good’ that may not grab you the minute you taste it but rather grows and grows and grows on you until one day you realize (as I have) that you’ve become enormously emotionally attached to the item at hand. It’s great just like it is. It’s even better toasted or put back in the oven for 20 minutes at 350°F ‘til the crust is crisp and the inside all warm. It’s outstanding with smoked salmon. It’s excellent with Creamery cream cheese. Great for grilled cheese with any of the aged mountain cheeses or cheddars and maybe some bacon.

If you have any of this great bread sitting around for too long it makes really tasty croutons. It also holds up really well so it’s a gift item—definitely put this on the list of foods to send to food-loving friends and family around the country if you want them to get to eat something special. Because special is the key here. This is really good American food. There is no other bread like this anywhere in the world.

On a more modern, socio-economic, political level, polenta demonstrates what great food can still be about. In his excellent “Omnivore’s Dilemma,” Michael Pollan points out that “There are some forty-five thousand products on supermarket shelves and more than a quarter of them now contain corn.” Of those, I’m sure polenta variants are less than a tenth of one percent. What he’s talking about is the corn syrup in soda, the corn that’s fed to the cows that we buy in the butcher section, the corn in the candy bars at the checkout counter.

Whereas the other corn activity is rather intentionally, or at least practically, secretive, great polenta puts corn out front. Unlike all those others items where corn is soda pop, corn is beef, corn is candy bars, here is corn is corn. And it’s good!

Cooking Polenta
The traditional technique is to steadily add a thin stream of dry polenta to boiling water, stirring continuously to avoid lumping, then to continue cooking and stirring for an hour or more ‘til it’s done. At best this can be tricky; at worst you wind up with an annoyingly large number of very unpleasant little lumps. I go for simply stirring in the polenta when the water is warm but NOT boiling. It seems to work every time, and I can’t quite figure out why everyone insists on waiting for the water to boil.

In terms of proportion, I generally go four parts water to one part polenta but you can adjust up or down depending on what thickness you want. As far as cooking time goes, I’d definitely say the longer the better. If you’re in a huge rush twenty minutes of bubbling action will probably suffice, but the flavor will be less developed than it could be.

While cooking, you do have to stir it, but I’ll say flat out that the amount of stirring required is really not all that big a deal. Once it’s going, I let the polenta cook fifteen, twenty minutes between stirs and it works fine. Covering the pot will keep it from cooking down too quickly and from forming a skin on the top. Less frequent stirring is likely to lead to the formation of a crust at the bottom of the pot. But like the soccarat (the crunchy bits of rice that stick to the bottom of the paella pan), the crust from the polenta pot is actually highly prized. I scrape it from the pot and eat it in thin slices, sort of like pork rinds or potato chips for corn eaters.

Eating Soft Polenta
This is really about as easy as it gets. As long as you’ve started with good polenta and have good toppings to put on it, it’s pretty hard to go wrong. You can do it with nothing but good butter, salt and pepper. It’s good with Gorgonzola, Parmigiano Reggiano, fresh goat cheese, Fontina val D’aosta or just about any cheese, really. And it’s great with tomato sauces of all sorts.

Cooked, Cooled, Sliced and Fried
First you cook the raw cornmeal and eat it warm and soft from the pot. Additional polenta is left overnight to cool, which makes it easy to slice for frying or baking. Polenta prepared in this manner is delicious, and can be served as a side dish with almost any meat, fish or vegetable, just as you would a potato or rice. You can also do polenta on the spit – skewers of polenta and Fontina dipped in egg and rolled in bread crumbs and then fried.

Polenta Partners
Like pasta, there is an almost limitless number of things to accompany polenta—perhaps even more because polenta is also good with sweet sauces as well as savory.

Two Great Butters to Melt on Top
A bowl of great polenta topped with a large pat of good butter is such a simple dish, and it’s a beautiful thing to behold an
d to eat. We recommend these two, available at our Creamery Cheese Shop:
1) Pastureland Butter from Minnesota
2) Cultured Butter from Vermont
Barrel-Aged Feta from Northern Greece

The very special, barrel-aged feta we get from the Almyros region of Greece is pretty remarkably good, whether you crumble onto (or into) polenta, eat it as is with a slice of bread or use it on salad, omelets or most anything else. It’s made from milk that’s gathered only from sheep that are grazing in the pastures.

Really Good Gorgonzola
Some simply lay a slab of their beloved blue cheese next to the bowl of polenta; the cheese needs to be at room temperature so that when you pick some up with your fork and put it on the hot polenta, it gets soft and melty. Others lay a whole slice of the cheese atop the bowl and let it soften that way. Better Gorgonzola is of course going to taste better. Ours is coming in from northern Italy, aged by Carlo and Giovanni Giori.

Parmigiano-Reggiano from the Hills of Modena
From one farm in the hills above Modena (home of Balsamic vinegar), this is a very special cheese. Having tasted from probably a hundred different dairies over the years, this cheese consistently stands out to me for its full flavor and fine finish. I could go on at length about what makes this cheese so good, but space doesn’t allow it.

Tomato sauces from Il Mongetto
Probably the best bottled tomato sauces I’ve ever tried, made up in the Piedmont region of northern Italy, not all that far (by American standards) from where the Marinos mill their corn. We’ve got half a dozen different varieties at the Deli and they’re all good.

Chestnut Honey
If you are eating polenta for breakfast, I really recommend topping it with a bit of this wonderfully bittersweet honey from the Deli.

Little Dragons from Zingerman’s Creamery
This is the newest cheese from the Creamery. It’s great on its own but it happens—really just coincidentally—to be particularly good on polenta. It’s a fairly fresh goat cheese, one that’s very lightly pressed to make for a modestly creamier texture than our super fresh rounds of City Goats, then rolled in fresh tarragon leaves.

Jim Grosh, business manager at the Roadhouse, tasted the first batch of creamed corn we made from it, smiled big and said, “Yep, that’s the stuff. I grew up on it.”  The late RW Apple who has written extensively on both food and politics for the New York Times for many years reported that, “I’ve been eating Cope’s corn since my childhood.” Writing about the Thanksgiving meal, he said, “More than anything except the turkey, it is a link to our forefathers, something we all seem to crave.”

The tradition of drying corn is a natural one. Corn is in season a few weeks of the year. The rest of the time it has to be preserved, and back then, drying was the most common way of preserving. The key is to get the corn into production right after picking before its sugars start turning to starches. The drying then caramelizes the natural sugars in the corn, giving it this subtle, toasty, super sweet flavor.

To this day, most all of the dried corn made is consumed within an hour or two of what should be called Dried Corn World Headquarters in Rheems, PA. That’s where the John Cope’s is. When it comes to dried corn today, Cope’s is it-they’re the only ones left making it! Martin Cope did his first batch in 1900 and the company is basically still doing it now as they were then. They buy corn only during the height of the season when the sugars are at their highest.

When we cook it up into Pennsylvania Dutch creamed corn, it’s got an amazing brightness of flavor that makes me want to eat this stuff even when corn is in season in the summer! In his New York Times piece, RW Apple quoted Thomas Cope as saying, “Isn’t it something? Such a simple process, but it gives you the taste of corn roasted over an open fire, not just in the summer but all year long.”

Creamed corn is only one of a few million things I think you can make with this stuff. The great thing about creamed corn made from Pennsylvania Dutch dried corn is that it was designed to be made in the middle of the winter and that it tastes terrific regardless of when you eat it. Essentially anything you make with fresh corn is going to be good with dried corn. We make a great corn chowder from it at the Roadhouse. So for the nine or ten months out of the year when there’s no good local corn to be had, this is the old-fashioned, great tasting, American way to go. Stop by the Roadhouse for a taste, or buy a box at the Deli, Mail Order or Roadhouse and cook some up for yourself.

My first response to people challenging what we were charging was to see what was really going on in the food world. So I went around and checked what other places were charging for pasta dishes. What I found was that in every half way decent restaurant in town they were charging pretty much the same prices we were for pasta.  This quelled my anxieties but left me still wondering to myself why so many customers seemed so stressed out by what we were charging.

Finally the obvious dawned on me – when people think “macaroni and cheese” they think “low end.” By contrast, when they think “pasta” they think suave Italian cachet. Which made me realize that this is really about a campaign for American culinary self-esteem and self-acceptance, and an effort to finally defeat the image that “if it’s foreign it’s fancier.” Because guys, let’s face facts – pasta is macaroni and cheese.

Sure, you can get the stuff that comes in a box. I grew up on it. Powdered whey by-product, horribly cheap noodles. You can step up from that and buy cheap commercial “macaroni” from Sexton and toss it with cheap commercial cheese after you buck it up with some canned cream sauce. Not very good either. I know this is what people have in their heads. Low end, mushily soft commercial macaroni with low end industrial cheese. Sounds terrible to me. And to let that define the category seems akin to letting Philadelphia brand define cream cheese or Wonder define bread.

The truth is that not only is the macaroni and cheese at the Roadhouse a really high end macaroni and cheese, it’s made with way better ingredients than almost any restaurant anywhere is going to use.

Typically we use Martelli maccheroni – to my taste, the best there is anywhere. It comes from Italy, and it’s really good. (I guess I should note that if there were an outstanding American pasta of that caliber we’d use it. I just don’t know of one yet. I love Al Dente as an egg noodle but it’s not the type of dried pasta that we need for this type of dish.) We use really good cheese – two-year old raw milk, hand made cheddar from Grafton Village in Vermont. We use real cream, Dijon mustard, and onions.

Our macaroni and cheese has got all the comfort-food appeal of the stuff you get out of a box, but it also stands toe to toe with any “pasta” dish you can find.

I will say up front that when I got going on this I didn’t realize right off that I was going to end up with a two-year project. Given my penchant for perfectionism my inclination is not to put these notes out until Ive learned a whole lot more about mush than I know now. But since that’ll take many months and since I’ve been happily eating this all week and in a little bit I’m going to go home and cook some more because it’s so darned good, I figured I should start getting the word out to you sooner, rather than later. So forgive the fact that my mush knowledge remains rather superficial and let this be an entree, not an ending. Your own experiences and insights would be very welcome send ‘em my way if you grew up with this stuff!!

I also want to make clear that the emphasis here has to be, as per the title above, isn’t really on mush for its own sake, but specifically about mush made from Anson Mills’ cornmeal. Since the dish is just cornmeal, water and salt it’s clearly only as good as the corn that goes into it. Anson’s is amazing; my fixation on the dish is coming really only because the corn meal we’re getting from Glenn at Anson Mills is so incredibly good. Mush made from Quaker cornmeal is going to be as bland as a sliced American single.

If you aren’t familiar with the name, mush is an old American dish that’s basically cooked cornmeal porridge. It’s pronounced “mush” like “rush”, and not “mush” as in “push.”. Mush can be eaten on its own for most any meal. You can do pretty much anything you do with grits or polenta you can do with mush. Which is why the first question that most everyone who doesn’t know it asks me is,

“What’s the difference between mush, polenta and grits?”

And a fine question it is. At a broad level you can certainly stick all three into the same category-porridge made of dried, ground corn. Taking the level of detail down a bit, the general answer I give about grits and polenta is that more often than not grits are more coarsely ground, and polenta finer. Corn meal for making traditional mush would typically be finer still. (There are of course exceptions which is . . . fine.) While the casual cook might think that the two sound like pretty much the same dish with different names, in the American South grits and mush are very definitely considered two different things. And for reasons I’ve not yet learned enough to know, while grits are really unknown in old time eating north of the Mason Dixon line (except with southern transplants or people like me who want to eat southern food up here), mush is all over old New England cooking.

In trying to figure out more about what makes these three dishes-mush, grits and polenta-different I talked to Glenn from Anson Mills, who’s done as much with growing, milling and cooking old corn varietals as anyone I know. He’s incredibly passionate about all things to do with old grains, corns and the Carolina Gold rice we get from him and he poured out pages of good info for me on this subject. After a long series of e-discussions, I finally came upon the belated glimpse of the obvious that I’d been focusing way too much on trying to come up with a black and white difference between each of the three dishes when in truth they’re all a bit different but clearly related.
I guess what I?m taking away is that the key for people to focus on is less on the name attached to the dish and more to:

a) The type of corn being used because between variety and terroir they all taste different,

b) The grind and its impact on texture and flavor of the corn

c) The ways that the dish is eaten, and what it’s eaten with in various places.

So . . . in the moment, leaving grits and polenta for future pieces . . .
given what I’ve just said, let’s focus on the mush I’ve been making. It’s incredibly simple: Anson Mills cornmeal, cooked at a ratio of about 4 parts water to 1 part cornmeal for an hour or so. You can go somewhat shorter or definitely longer-with all these corn porridges longer is almost always better if you have the time because the starches break down slowly and you get a creamier, richer texture.

Again, the reason I’ve fallen so in love with making mush is, without question because the Anson Mills corn meal is so incredibly good. Like all their stuff this meal is made from heirloom varietals that yield about 20% at best of what you get out of commercial corns. (Alex has spoken at length about this with all the work he’s doing to grow heirlooms at Cornman Farms.) Right now Anson’s meal is made from four old varietals-Leaming, John Haulk, Jarvis and Hickory King Yellow. All four are dent corns (which are softer in texture than the alternative, known as flint corn). Glenn related that,”All, except the Leaming are of Carolina or Georgia provenance; Leaming is one of the three yellow corns used in the first hybrid production trials before 1900 . . . provenance Pennsylvania . . . very floral.” Like I said, the man takes his cornmeal very seriously. In the NY Times a few years ago he said, ” Great corn is like great wine.” I agree wholeheartedly; this is the other end of the agricultural world from the industrial corns that Michael Pollan writes about in “Omnivore’s Dilemma.”

Like everything we get from Anson Mills, the corn is grown organically.
It’s field dried and stone ground. Because, like all Anson products, it has the germ left in (which makes it way more flavorful) it has to be refrigerated, so please keep that in mind for storage here, or if you’re sending it to customers out of town. (Frank just visited with Glenn in person so he may have some good things to add to this.)

All four of the varietals in this mix are yellow corn, as, obviously then, is the meal itself. To quote Glenn, “It’s hard to make a general statement about corn flavors associated with color, but whites tend toward mineral and floral and yellows are usually more forwardly “corn” in flavor with floral nuances in the background.?

Floral is the key word for me. The first time I ate this stuff I did a little double take, thinking maybe I’d let something into the pot other the water, cornmeal and salt-it really was that good, and that different. Aromatic. Delicious. I mean it sounds silly to get so poetic about something as seemingly simple as mush but . . . I’m there.

You can serve most anything with mush. It can be cooked up with other items-certainly most any sauteed or roasted vegetable would be good. Unlike polenta in Italy you won’t see old recipes for it served with tomato sauce because colonial era Americans really didn’t eat tomatoes. What they did eat apparently was lots of “mush and milk,” which is just what it sounds like. A bowl of hot mush with cold milk either on the side or in a well made in the middle of the mush. (This is no surprise since it’s exactly how the Irish still eat oatmeal today.) My 1918 copy of “The Book of Corn Cookery” gives recipes for mush with figs, dates, and prunes. It’s also good topped with honey and of course with cheese. (It also has a buttermilk mush-meal cooked in buttermilk instead of water in a double boiler. Haven’t tried it yet but will.) I’ve seen it done with greens and I’ve got a Gullah recipe for oyster mush that I’m definitely going to try this week.

What I’ve been making at home is a dish that I read about in some Civil War era food writing-it’s just mush served up with fried bacon pieces and a lot of bacon fat. I’ve been using the Arkansas peppered bacon which I love but any of our good bacons would work well I’m sure. Just fry the bits of bacon til crisp and then pour it and the fat in the pan over top of the mush, add a bit of salt and pepper and eat it hot. I’m telling you . . . it’s good.
Serve it with a fried egg if you’re so inclined. Speaking of fried, mush is often served that way as well-cooked, cooled and then cut into slabs and fried up the next day. Again bacon fat would be the obvious Southern choice but you could certainly do it with butter or olive oil I suppose too.

For the dessert thing . . . up in New England mush most often seems to be known by the name Hasty Pudding. Hasty pudding is really simple-cooked mush topped with something sweet. Historically it seems like a precursor of Indian pudding, which required more ingredients and started to get closer to the steamed puddings the colonists would have craved from back home in Britain. In New England hasty pudding is often (though definitely not always) eaten with a sweet topping, most often, up there, maple syrup.
Which is very good. But to my personal taste, better still is the southern version, which is to serve the mush, topped with sorghum syrup. I like the maple, but I swear by the sorghum. If you want it straight from the miller, Glenn’s official quote on the subject of sorghum on mush (sounds like a town in rural England) was “Yummy.” He added that, “my daughter Ansley would
fight for this dish . . . and she’s a pacifist.” Me too on both counts.

I know this corn-based dessert thing probably sounds strange but remember, unlike most of the population, I’m inclined towards savory rather than sweet so . . . for me, this is like the best dessert (said with due deference to the masters of chocolate and pastry making and impassioned dessert eating people around here like Amy, Charlie, Duff, Nina and others). The sweetness of the corn and its . . . I guess, corniness come up against the slightly sour, just a bit bitter, deep dark sweetness of the sorghum. (Glenn suggested the term “whiplash” to describe this sweet/sour phenomenon as it was used to profile the best Madeira back in colonial times.) I think, for me, the sourness of the sorghum draws me in more than the higher notes of the maple but you can do it any way you like. Be good with molasses too I’m sure. (For more on sorghum syrup, see the May-June issue of Zingerman’s News or drop me a line and I’ll send you info ASAP.)

OK, there you go, more than you ever wanted to know about mush. If you’re up for a bit of cornmeal cooking, give it a try. If you like it half as much as I have I think it’ll be worth the stove time.

(Although we can and I’m sure will, we dont formally have this stuff rolled out for sale yet. The Roadhouse has the cornmeal on hand for the catfish, hush puppies and fried green tomatoes. While we haven’t been serving it as mush we probably will be soon. And anyone in the ZCoB can get it there or directly from Anson in quantity when we get our next orders in.)

Ingredients

2 cups Anson Mills Carolina Gold rice
4 medium tomatoes
1/2 pound Arkansas peppered bacon, chopped
1 small onion, chopped
2 cups chicken broth (you will not end up using it all)
Sea salt to taste
Freshly ground black pepper to taste

Procedure

Wash the rice in cold water three times, or until the water runs clear.

Halve the tomatoes and squeeze the juice into a medium bowl. You’ll want about 2 cups liquid for cooking the rice, so measure out the tomato juice and top it off with enough chicken broth to equal 2 cups total.

Chop the “juiced” tomatoes and set aside.

Fry the bacon in a heavy-bottomed stockpot over moderate heat until it’s crisp, about 15 minutes or so. Remove the bacon from the pot, and set it aside on a towel to drain.

Reduce the heat slightly and add the chopped onion to the pot. Sauté the onion, stirring occasionally, until it’s slightly caramelized, about 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, bring the broth and tomato juice to a boil in a medium-sized pan and reduce to a low simmer. If you’re working with unsalted broth, add 1 teaspoon salt.

When the onions are slightly caramelized, raise the heat a bit and add the rice and stir well. Sauté for a couple of minutes, stirring constantly, until the rice is very hot and shiny.

Stir the chopped tomatoes into the rice and cook another minute or so, stirring constantly.

Stir the simmering broth into the rice, cover, reduce heat to low and cook for 15 minutes. Turn off heat and let stand covered for 15 minutes. (The rice will continue cooking in the steam, so no peaking!) Add a bit of salt and a generous dose of freshly ground black pepper, fluff with a fork and serve!

Anson Mills grits have become one of the signature dishes at the Roadhouse, a regular breakfast at the Deli and big Mail Order item too. What makes ‘em so special? I could go at length but here’s a quick version.

Although I wasn’t there, I’m guessing this is what grits tasted like before modernization got going and took the heart and soul out of ‘em and left us with the long life, low flavor, mass market industrial product that most Americans now think of. These, however, are what grits should be all about. In terms of eating it’s simple – when you taste these grits they taste like corn. Which seems sort of a stupid statement to make until you taste some of the supermarket version of grits and discover that they really don’t taste of anything at all unless you add something to them to flavor them. But the point of grits is the corn! That’s what they are!

For starters there’s the corn (imagine that?!) The grits are made primarily from a 19th century variety that Glenn has got growing again called Carolina Gourdseed. It’s an old variety that’s exceptionally flavorful. Glenn found the Carolina Gourdseed growing in a field near Dillon, SC. It turns out that it was a variety that was bred to stay in the fields until late fall (no early harvest) when it would be fully ripe. The corn would be left in the field to dry, and then, as the weather got colder, to stay there under the winter snows and frosts until it was brought in, a bit at a time, to be milled. It’s Glenn’s belief – and I have no reason to doubt it – that this centuries-old milling work was in essence the cold milling that he’s now revived. If it tastes so great, why did people stop growing corn like this?

In general, these heirloom varieties yield about 1/4 to 1/3 of what commercial corn now yields. They’re also riskier to grow. These old-style corns were bred to ripen on the stalk, not in a silo. That’s good news for us flavor-lovers but not for those who want to play it safe in their growing. What we’re getting when we get Anson Mills corn is never taken from the stalk until it’s fully ripe – that means more flavor in every kernel of corn, just as you’d get with properly tree-ripened produce in the summer. Most corn now used for milling into grits (or cornmeal or whatever) is picked young and in order to decrease the risk of loss from weather. Between yield and risk of loss in the field, the cost of producing these corns is about 4-12 times what it costs to produce commercial corn for grinding!

Everything you’ve come to love about great, fresh, properly raised traditional produce at the Farmer’s Market is true with great grits too – great grits are a perishable, fresh product. We’re fortunate to have them!

Today, there are maybe a dozen mills doing anything resembling old style grits milling in the whole country. In 1800, there were 40 mills per county in the Carolinas. Corn ground for grits – although dried in the field – was still “alive” and could still be used as seed corn because its enzymes are still intact. It also means that it’s much, much more flavorful.

By contrast all the commercial milling today has shifted to steaming the corn to get the hulls off, to having the germ taken out (and in the process, most all of the flavor), then milling at ambient temperature with steel roller mills and then packing and setting into the distribution chain for a few years before being cooked up to the rather tasteless paste that most people nowadays associate with grits.

At Anson Mills, everything in the milling process is done to keep temperatures down and in the process protect the flavor of the corn. First, all the dried corn is taken down to -10F before milling. Second, the entire mill room and the stones are kept at 55F. That means that the corn during the milling stays very cool – never gets above 58F. Also, Anson’s grits are milled very coarse by modern standards, then sifted into four different sized particles (aka “fractions”). The different particle sizes are then blended to get the right ratio of coarseness and fineness that creates a great eating experience. The long cooking grits are probably the coarsest in the US.

We’ve been selling and serving Anson Mills grits for a few years now, and I’ve loved them from day one. But the more I learn about them (and all the other products the mill produces) the more I’m into them. We get both a quicker cooking (relatively finer-textured) grits and a longer cooking grits. The quick cooking can be ready in 20 to 30 minutes (though longer cooking will be even better still and result in a creamier bowl of grits). The coarser, long-cooking grits should go for 1-2 hours. The long cooking are much coarser and truly delicious, if you have the stove time. (If you cook them covered on low heat you really don’t have to stir all that much and they’re delicious!).