THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, August 29, 1995 TAG: 9508290292
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 61 lines
A note from Dr. Bernard H. Miller describes his surprising encounter with a menu on a recent three-week trip to East Africa.
A part of the pleasure of travel is to eat each nation's food and so at the Mara Serena Lodge in Tanzania in the Serengeti Plain, Dr. Miller ordered an exotic meal: UGALI MCHICHA NA NYAMA YA NG'CMBENG.
And sat back and waited with keen interest to see it. When dinner arrived, it consisted of greens (spinach), beef stew and the ugali, which looked like grits.
``Is this grits?'' he asked the waiter.
No, no, porridge. Maize.
It tasted like grits.
Over came the headwaiter, educated in the United States.
Yes, he said, ugali was grits.
``I traveled thousands of miles to get a Southern dish, grits,'' Dr. Miller marveled the other day.
I'll send the menu to the National Grits Museum, South Carolina. There's got to be one.
Another grits story is at hand.
Archie Twiford of Norfolk recalls that a friend, a salesman from New Jersey, spent three days in a small hotel in South Carolina, and each morning the waitress brought grits, which he stoutly rejected.
On the third day when he received grits unwanted, unordered, he said to her: ``Young lady, why is it this establishment keeps serving me grits over my protests?''
``I don't know,'' she said. ``I guess it's a state law.''
At home the other morning, when the grandchildren came to breakfast, one of the daughters-in-law stood at my elbow as I poured grits into a boiler of bubbling water.
``How do you know how much to pour?'' she asked.
``Until it looks like enough.''
I added several shots of water and began stirring, lifting a spoonful now and then and letting it dribble to test the progress.
``So how do you know when it's the right consistency?'' she asked.
``You want it to have a sweet togetherness, like old friends or kin folks embracing after a long time, but you don't want it to clump all up as if they are in a pitched battle over something.''
While her back was turned, I dumped more grits into the steaming pot.
I stirred, adding water every so often until the level rose nearly to the rim and held.
``So what makes it expand?'' she asked.
``It's the principle of atoms breaking apart, multiplying under centrifugal force,'' I said. ``The fellow who discovered fission hit on the principle one morning when he was fixing grits for breakfast.''
Her 5-year-old son gobbled down the grits, the best he ever ate, he said.
``Did you learn how to cook them?'' he asked.
``I learned how to promote fission,'' his mother said. by CNB