The regional table / South Carolina
Shrimp and Grits, the Way Charleston Printed It
The shrimp take four minutes. Everything else about this dish is the forty-five you give the grits.
The Charleston version of this went into print in 1930, in 200 Years of Charleston Cooking, recipes gathered by Blanche S. Rhett and edited by Lettie Gay. It is called Shrimps with Hominy, it is four lines long, and its headnote says it is a breakfast dish served in almost every house in Charleston during the shrimp season. The ingredients are raw shrimp, butter, salt and black pepper, and cooked hominy. Shell the shrimp, put them in melted butter, stir until they are hot, cover and cook about ten minutes, serve with the hot hominy. The book signs it William's Recipe, and William is William Deas, the Rhett family's butler and cook, introduced earlier in the same book as the man who makes their she-crab soup.
Two absences in that book are worth as much as the recipe. There is no cream, no roux, no cheese, no bacon, no gravy and no tomato: the sauce is butter and whatever the shrimp give up into it. And the word grits does not appear anywhere in the book — hominy does, thirty times, in the soups, the breads and the waffles. What Charleston ate for breakfast was shrimp on hominy, and the dish acquired its present name, and most of what people now put in it, a long way downstream from the document.
Why this version works
Four minutes in butter, not ten. The 1930 book covered the pan and gave them ten minutes, which is how a shrimp becomes a rubber band. The same 1917 bulletin warned packers that overcooking hardens the meat while undercooking leaves it flabby and tasteless; the window in between is narrow and it is reached the moment the last grey goes.
The pan butter goes on the plate. Whatever cooked out of the shrimp is in that butter. Pour it over the grits rather than leaving it in the pan, and the dish needs no sauce at all — which is exactly what the Charleston recipe assumed.
The shells make the cooking liquid. A federal bulletin on shrimp handling, USDA Bulletin 538 of 1917, measured the heads and appendages at 43 to 45 per cent of the whole raw stock — nearly half the weight of a whole shrimp is the part most people throw away. Ten minutes of simmering the shells gives you a cup of stock for the grits and costs nothing.
The grits get water and time, not milk. Coarse stone-ground corn needs about forty-five minutes and roughly four parts liquid to one of grits before the starch gives up and goes creamy on its own. Milk scorches on the bottom of the pot over that stretch and makes you rush it; water does not, and the butter at the end supplies the richness the milk was standing in for.