[Photographs: Jillian Atkinson]
Most individuals would not affiliate grits with being delicate. Grits are filling and hearty, one thing you eat that sticks to your ribs to maintain you full all through the day. And for those who’re not from a sure a part of the Southeastern U.s., there is a first rate probability you are not acquainted with well made, high quality grits. However not solely will pot of grits wow a crowd, in a preparation like Awendaw soufflé, it is the definition of lightness.
Awendaw is a grits dish well-known in Charleston that straddles the road between a cornbread, a spoonbread, and a soufflé—the truth is, relying on the recipe, you may even see it described as one or the opposite. Many variations are, on a technical degree, remarkably much like a soufflé, with the grits taking the place of a French soufflé’s bechamel base; overwhelmed egg whites are folded into the grits, which puff and swell because the Awendaw bakes.
Whether or not there was precise French affect on the recipe is difficult to say, although one of many first mentions of Awendaw is in Carolina Housewife, a cookbook printed in 1847. Written by a lady named Sarah Rutledge, the e-book mixed many cooking strategies and elements present in or dropped at the Deep South with these of the favored French “haute” or “grande” delicacies of the time. Recipes utilizing elements like benne seeds or okra are discovered alongside items on methods to make clear a inventory for “le bouillon” and a recipe for “boeuf a la gardette”—a change from many early American cookbooks, which had been rather more closely influenced by the Northern colonies and the Dutch or English backgrounds of lots of their residents.
The title Awendaw, or Owendaw, comes from an space of the Lowcountry of South Carolina that the indigenous Sewee individuals as soon as inhabited. Earlier than they fled their homeland on the coast, they shared their data of rising and making ready corn for consumption with the varied colonizers of the Southeast.
Probably the most in style and recognizable dishes ready from corn is cornbread, and, within the South, its extra creamy cousin, spoonbread, is simply as fondly ready by skilled fingers. In Rutledge’s Carolina Housewife, the recipe is listed as “Owendaw Cornbread,” and it requires hominy, milk, cornmeal, and eggs to make a dish that’s the consistency of a baked, boiled custard. Her recipe for “Corn Spoon Bread” has comparable elements however is made extra like a cornmeal pancake, its batter dropped by the spoonful onto a sizzling griddle, giving the recipe its title.
By the Fifties the manufacturing of cornmeal, hominy, and grits had change into extra industrialized, making them rather more accessible and simpler to prepare dinner. That is the place a recipe by the title “Awendaw Spoonbread” first emerges. Mrs. Ralph Izard gave it to the Junior League of Charleston, and it may be present in Charleston Receipts, the oldest Junior League e-book nonetheless in print right this moment. Mrs. Izard’s recipe is extra akin to a baked grits casserole, with a slight rise from the addition of the eggs, however rather more agency in texture in comparison with the recipes of Sarah Rutledger, as a result of quantity of grits and cornmeal within the recipe.
The recipe for the Awendaw soufflé that I am providing under is a mix of each of these girls’s recipes and strategies, and an homage to the various Black cooks and cooks of the South who typically didn’t have formal culinary coaching (some cooks, like James Hemings, had been capable of be classically skilled), however had been among the most essential innovators of American cooking, weaving collectively strategies from world wide with acquainted Indigenous and Southern staples like cornmeal and grits. Theirs had been typically the fingers making the meals present in home cookbooks in antebellum America.
Whereas this recipe requires steps similar to making a soufflé, which might appear formidable to many cooks, it is fairly easy to make with success (though there are particular concerns crucial for these cooking at increased elevations, as famous within the recipe). So long as you rigorously fold the overwhelmed whites into the grits base so that they are absolutely integrated however nonetheless retain some air, the Awendaw will rise and puff—not fairly as dramatically as a bechamel-based soufflé (these grits do begin out on the dense and heavy aspect), however noticeably so. The ensuing consistency must be creamy, nearly custardy, and nonetheless gentle and fluffy regardless of being constructed from grits.
The dish takes about an hour and a half to arrange and bake, together with cooking the grits. When you don’t have soufflé ramekins, a baking dish with excessive sides will work simply as properly, creating the impact of the rising soufflé, and the dish will be scooped and served on the desk like spoonbread. Different cheeses, herbs, and fillings (like contemporary candy corn) can be utilized rather than the chives and cheddar cheese as properly.
