Introduction, with things to eat

Cheesy grits and shoofly pie is a pretty good description of our son Jacob’s pedigree: cheesy grits from the South Carolina Lowcountry and shoofly pie from the Old Order Amish and Amish Mennonites of Indiana and Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. My family always knew about our shoofly pie part, but discovering my wife’s South Carolina Lowcountry and other origins has been a real eye-opener. She has always thought of herself as more or less entirely a Yankee—an athlete, cheerleader, and prom queen, no less—born in Norwalk, Connecticut and raised in nearby Southport. All that’s true, of course, but it turns out to be far from the whole story. I’m going to have a crack at telling more of that story here, but I’m going to start with food rather than relatives.

Soul Food is a great book
by Adrian Miller that traces
the evolution of classic
Southern dishes.

If you want to understand the South Carolina Lowcountry (yes, they write it as one word down there), one of the things you have to understand is how foods have helped make the southern U.S. into “the South.” This is especially true since the Civil War, as the difficult economic conditions that prevailed in the South after the Civil War meant that everybody, black and white, ate pretty similarly. And one of the signature foods of the South was corn, in the form of cornmeal: cornbread, hoe cakes, corn pone, corn muffins, and of course grits, which if you remember is where we started back at the top of the page.

In the event that you are a Yankee or some benighted Mennonite who doesn’t yet know what grits are, I’ll tell you: they’re made from ground corn that’s been milled either whole to produce yellow grits or has had the hull and germ removed  to produce white grits. (Grind either of these finer and you’ve got yellow or white cornmeal.) Around Charleston, I’ve had both yellow and white grits. I prefer yellow, but I’d suspect that, being a Yankee, my opinion doesn’t count for very much.

And don’t confuse hominy with grits. Hominy is corn after it’s been soaked in an alkali bath and the hull and germ removed. But that distinction isn’t always clear: the fabled Charleston Receipts cookbook, published by the Junior League of Charleston in 1950, is emphatic:

“Never call it ‘Hominy Grits’

Or you will give Charlestonians fits!

When it comes from the mill, it’s ‘grist’;

After you cook it well, I wist,

You serve ‘hominy’! Do not skimp;

Serve butter with it and lots of shrimp.” (p. 153)

The word “grist” seems to give it away because that’s simply grain that’s been ground in a mill with no alkali bath in sight. But here they nevertheless use the word 'hominy' for what the rest of us call 'grits.'

The third from last line in the little rhyme above is the secret to good grits: cook it well. Instant grits are thus disposed of, the supposed point of them being that you can get an edible product without having to “cook it well.” But that road leads to the perdition. Salvation, on the other hand, comes to your whole soul when it is awakened by a spoonful of the buttery richness that is well-cooked grits.

Put about 4 ½ cups of water and a teaspoonful of salt in a saucepan and bring it to a boil. Slowly stir in 1 cup of grits and reduce the heat to the barest of simmers. If you use a higher heat, you’ll have to stir it more to keep it from sticking to the bottom of the pot. Once it thickens, stir more frequently. If it gets too stiff, add some more water; you don’t want soup, but you don’t want thick paste either. Keep stirring enough that it doesn’t stick. After forty or fifty minutes, the grits will start to get really smooth and creamy. Stir in some butter (to taste) and then serve hot. That’s the essential grits recipe. Cheese and all those other things that people put in depend on getting the basic recipe right.

Buttery yellow grits I had for breakfast on my last visit
to Charleston. Best grits I've had so far!  

There is another ingredient that is more peculiar to Charleston and the Lowcountry than maybe other parts of the south: rice. Rice needs lots of fresh water to grow in, so the river flats of the Lowcountry were prime rice territory—in fact, many of the Lowcountry plantations derived their wealth from rice more than cotton. Africans from the “Rice Coast” of Africa, e.g., Gambia and Sierra Leone, were desirable as slaves precisely because they knew how to grow rice. 

If you should visit the Charleston Museum on Meeting Street in Charleston (and you should), you’ll see an interesting collection of implements used for growing rice in the Lowcountry. But we’ll have to pass on that staple this time around—although you should remember the name “Carolina Gold” for the best in South Carolina rice.

The second part of Jacob’s pedigree is shoofly pie. Nobody knows who invented it or how it got its name. It is pretty definitively Pennsylvania Dutch; however, one must be careful in using the term “Pennsylvania Dutch” because it refers not only to the varieties of Amish in eastern Pennsylvania, but also to the German Lutherans and Moravians of northeastern Pennsylvania. They’re more apt to be the ones with hex signs on their buildings, as the Amish don’t decorate their buildings at all. Clean, yes; decorated, no. 

The key to understanding this ethnic jumble is realizing that the “Dutch” in “Pennsylvania Dutch” is a clumsy anglicisation of “Deutsch,” meaning “German.” Another of the things these Amish and Lutheran groups have in common is some form of the German language, which is also referred to as “Pennsylvania Dutch.” As with the people themselves, there are variations from group to group. And beyond the language that they have more or less in common, they have a pie more or less in common: shoofly pie.

Shoofly pie is a pie with a pastry shell, a molasses bottom and a crumb top. When the molasses bottom is thick enough to form a gooey band of black richness under the crumb top, it’s called a “wet-bottom pie.” The “dry-bottom” version lacks that rich syrupy goodness and is more like a crumb cake. I prefer the wet-bottom.

Wet-bottom shoofly pie.

Shoofly pie is, like cornmeal, peasant food. It doesn’t require any fancy ingredients or techniques: nothing more than flour, water, an egg, molasses, fat, sugar, salt and baking powder and soda—and it doesn’t need to be refrigerated once it’s baked. You prepare a regular pie crust for a 9 inch pan. The molasses bottom is one cup of dark molasses (not blackstrap; dark Karo will work fine), one beaten egg, 3/4 cup of boiling water and ½ teaspoon of soda. Dissolve the soda in the hot water, add the syrup and then the beaten egg. Pour 1/3 of the liquid into the unbaked crust. Make the crumb mixture by combining 1 cup flour, 2/3 cup of brown sugar and 1 tablespoon of shortening. (Lard is great but....) Cut everything together until you get crumbs the size of peas. Put one third of the crumbs into the liquid. Add the second third of the liquid and put the second third of the crumbs in. Add the rest of the liquid and sprinkle the crumbs around on top. Bake at 375 degrees for about 15 minutes and then lower the oven temperature to 350 and bake for another 20 minutes or so—until a knife stuck in the middle comes out clean.

Shoofly pie is great served with ice cream, yogurt, whipped cream, whole milk, or chocolate milk. My old friend Mose Stoltzfus used to have a slice of shoofly pie with milk for breakfast every morning.

Our son Jake’s shoofly pie pedigree has been known to us–well, to me at least–for a very long time, as we Amish Mennonites have been family historians for a long time. We keep records. And books: what we call “the Hertzler-Hartzler book”, which is known bibliographically as The Hertzler-Hartzler Family History and was compiled by Silas Hertzler and published in Goshen, Indiana in 1952; Descendants of Barbara Hochstetler, Descendants of Jacob Hochstetler (more commonly known as “the DJH book”), and so on, are all famous titles on my side of the family. These books take our line all the way back to the boat. Or boats, because my ancestors didn’t all come at the same time. But they were, save one, all Old Order Amish or later Amish Mennonite, including the claim that our family line includes the first Amish bishop in America. His name was Jacob Hertzler, and he first settled in Berks County, PA, not far from Reading. Jacob Hertzler, who begat Christian, who begat another Christian, who begat Samuel, who begat Joseph, who begat Esther, who begat me, who begat light-brown-haired and blue-eyed Jacob, the scion of cheesy grits and shoofly pie.



Sources:

Miller, Adrian. Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time. University of North Carolina Press: 2013. Miller traces the history of the idea of "soul food" along with the evolution of specific dishes, including fried chicken, mac 'n cheese, chitlins, red drink, and others. Winner of a 2014 James Beard Foundation Book Award for Reference and Scholarship. Hard to find a reference book that is more fun to read.

Junior League of Charleston. Charleston Receipts. The one on my shelf is the 30th edition, published in 1995. It's a gift from my dear friend, the late Joy Jones.

Showalter, Mary Emma. Mennonite Community Cookbook. Herald Press: 1950. My mother had two cookbooks on her shelf: the Mennonite Community Cookbook and some little Betty Crocker thing which I don't recall ever seeing her use. My first attempt at a shoofly pie was done using the recipe in the Mennonite Community Cookbook, but it turns out that their recipe doesn't have a nice moist crumb: too much flour. I've subsequently experimented and the above works much better. Feel free to mess about with it.

Next post: Shoofly Pie: The Two Jakes