True Grits

All through our fabled marriage, I have amused Peggy with my "witty" bons mots, "snappy" rejoinders and "hilarious" stories involving people walking into bars, and so forth. I can honestly say that we have not had all the riches one man can claim, Peggy is not swimming in diamonds (or even a pool) and neither of us are in danger of being selected to the High Rollers club.

But, doggone it, we have had more than our share of laughter over the years, and it's been great. And I can still remember 'way back when, shortly after we met, I asked Peggy if she made her hominy from scratch or just opened a can.

She looked at me, not for the last time ever in almost total bewilderment, and then asked me what hominy was. And it was then that I realized that the world, as is so often the case, is easily divisible into two groups: those who love hominy and those who don't. For the longest time, I figured that those who had not yet HAD hominy would convert to hominyphiles just as soon as they tried it. Such was not to be the case.

For the record, hominy is the result of taking dried corn for a bath in lye, until the hulls are removed. The result is a porridge that can't be beaten for taste, especially when you heat it up in the pan with some sage sausage. Grits is the result of grinding up the dried corn into sand-size pellets, which you then cook up with water and some salt and serve with eggs and bacon. These were staples of my boyhood diet, although they are traditionally Southern foods. In my boyish enthusiasm, I used to envision a world in which hominy would be served at almost every table, that there would be a Hominy Bowl football every New Year's Day (following the Hominy Parade overseen by the newly-coronated Hominy Queen, chains of Hominy King or Mr Grits drive-in restaurants, the inevitable Hominy Invitational Golf Tournament, and, when the time was right, the replacement of french fried potatoes with a heapin' helping of grits at all lunch counters and diners.

Then, I had Peggy try some of my mom's homemade hominy. Nothing. I bought a can of Manning's Hominy for her. Her eyebrows went up and her fork went down. In desperation, I whomped up a mess of grits and she said, to use the vernacular, "Yuck." My dreams of universal hominification dashed, I turned instead to solace in a bowl of Manning's finest. Please join me in a bowl of hominy someday, won't you?