Shrimps and Hominy, 1930 (Charleston)

Shrimp, butter, grits, salt. That’s the entire original, and it is startlingly plain. No cheese. No mushrooms. No cream gravy. No andouille. No bacon. Make this once before you make any of the others — everything else you’ve eaten under this name is an accretion on top of four ingredients.

Ingredients

• 4 cups hot cooked grits
• ½ cup butter, divided

Salt

• 1 lb raw shrimp

Directions

1. Add 2 Tbsp of the butter and 1 tsp salt to the cooked grits, if they aren’t already salted.
2. Heat 4 Tbsp of the butter in a frying pan and sauté the shrimp just until they change colour. Remove them from the pan.
3. Melt the remaining butter in the pan.
4. Top the grits with the shrimp and pour the butter over.
5. That’s it. That’s the recipe.

Notes

Credit goes first, not in a footnote

This dish is Gullah Geechee. The Gullah Geechee — descendants of West and Central Africans enslaved to grow rice in the Lowcountry of coastal South Carolina and Georgia — developed it. The earliest versions were fried shrimp coated in flour, salt and pepper, served with a roux over a cereal grain: rice, millet, or corn.

Michael Twitty, in The Cooking Gene, identifies the deeper root: as corn travelled from the Americas to Africa, it was absorbed into the diets of the very populations later carried to the American South by the Atlantic slave trade — and in central and southeastern Africa that corn was eaten as porridge, alongside shrimp. The pairing arrived already formed.

Twitty, more bluntly than I would dare: “I don’t care what anyone says; shrimp and grits came from Mozambique.”

“Breakfast shrimp” was a seasonal fisherman’s and home breakfast — eaten during shrimp season, with small creek shrimp caught free with a cast net. “Mostly a meal prepared at home, not one found in restaurants.”

⚠ Two source conflicts I’ll report rather than resolve

The year: 1930 or 1931? Most sources and the publisher say 1930; Wikipedia says 1931. Minor — I’m using 1930 and noting the discrepancy.

And the number 78 gets garbled. One source says the recipe is credited to Rhett’s African-American butler William Deas, “who is said to be 78 years old.” Another says it’s from a man who reported eating the dish every morning during shrimp season “for 78 years without tiring of it.” Those are different claims and one is a transmission error — the “78 years old” reading looks like the original, with “78 years of eating it” the corruption. I couldn’t check the 1930 book itself, so you get both. Either way the implication survives: the dish was routine in Charleston well before the Civil War.

⚠ “Hominy” here means cooked grits

Not nixtamalized corn. In the Lowcountry, “hominy” historically meant cooked grits — which is why this recipe is titled “Shrimps and Hominy” and why the 1976 edition quietly retitled it “Breakfast Shrimp and Grits.” The word changing is the whole story of that retitling.

(“Hominy” has at least three live meanings, and the 1910 Army had a fourth. It’s the single biggest reason this literature is a mess.)

The cream-gravy version is the NEWEST one in the room

Here’s the kicker. Bill Neal put shrimp and grits on the menu at Crook’s Corner in 1982 and Craig Claiborne took it national from there. Neal’s version added cheddar and Parmesan to the grits, plus jumbo shrimp, mushrooms and bacon — none of which is traditional. It’s a variation, and a rich one.

But the version most Americans think of as “authentic Southern shrimp and grits” — the cream gravy one — is neither Charleston-traditional nor New Orleans-traditional. It’s a 1990s restaurant invention: since the 1990s Charleston-area chefs have served versions with cream and French shallots, departing from traditional Lowcountry method. It’s newer than Neal’s, and about 160 years newer than what William Deas ate for breakfast.

A Lowcountry executive chef puts the traditional position sharply: “the real shrimp and grits has a brown gravy, not a red gravy, not a cream gravy — it’s basically like a smothered shrimp.” Note that’s a position, staked against both the Creole red gravy and the modern cream one.

And the framing, which matters

Don’t write “Bill Neal invented shrimp and grits.” Don’t even write “Bill Neal elevated a humble dish” — that’s the same claim in a nicer coat. The Levine Museum of the New South says it exactly right: “Despite the many hands — black, brown, and white — that prepared the dish over time, it was Bill Neal, a white chef raised in Grover, North Carolina, who… created a version of the dish that became cemented in the cuisine of the American South.”

The dish already existed and was already good. What changed was who was allowed to be paid for it, and who got written about.

(⚠ And the Claiborne piece is dated 1985 by most sources and 1984 by The Local Palate. Unresolved — the NYT archive blocks automated access.)

A note from the source

Shrimp may be peeled before or after cooking, though simmering rather than sautéing is preferred when cooking shrimp in the shell.

For grits worth putting under it, use the method in Grit Cakes, Fried Cheese — the skim and the soak, just stopped before the sheet pan.