Heirloom corn, like the Carolina Gourdseed pictured here, can grow up to 15 feet tall.

The Grits Tradition
In Antebellum times, all great kitchen gardens on Charleston plantations were built on the Native American model of multiple sweet and mill corn varieties, intercropped with fruits, vegetables, medicinal plants, and herbs. Sweet and mill corn were crossbred every five years to produce outstanding grits corn, another tradition that Carolinians took from Native Americans.

The culture of corn and fresh grits, corn that passed between the stones of a hand mill straight from the garden and into a pot, survived unchanged in the fields and on the tables of Coastal Carolina well into the 20th century. What did change was the quality and flavor of grits produced from modern monocrop hybrids compared with grits produced from corn bred for taste, texture, and nutrition.

The distinct corn varieties of Charleston's kitchen-garden heritage—the best of which stayed close to their Native American antecedents—drew Anson Mills into heirloom farming and artisan milling. These "single-family hand-selects" produce a rainbow of colors, grow up to 15 feet tall in the field, and possess varying hardness and kernel architecture depending on what they were bred for—fresh hand milling, parching over fire, or processing to hominy with potash. Most of them were recovered from retiring bootleg families who had good reason to hand-select their own varieties—it allowed them to remain in business and out of jail.

As heirloom corn varieties disappear and fewer and fewer Carolinians engage in hobby cropping, Anson Mills acts as the sole repository for some of the most famous family corns in Coastal Carolina and Georgia.

White or Yellow?
Historically, white corn was popular in the urban port cultures of the South (Wilmington, Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans) that were settled by Europeans with a predilection for white mill goods. Moving inland, through the rural American South, yellow corn and grits predominated.

In their early efforts to breed corn, European settlers focused on yellow to increase per-acre yields for animal feed. Antebellum white  corns, on the other hand, remained close to their Native American  antecedents. This may explain why white corns to this day possess heightened flavors of the earth and carry more mineral and floral  nuances than yellow corns. 

Coarse or Quick?
Created in the tradition of the stone-ground, hand-milled grits of the Antebellum era, Anson Mills coarse grits have a large particle size that imparts a toothsome texture and pronounced corn flavor. Coarse grits do take time to cook—an hour, at least—but are any cook's first choice when served as a stand-alone dish or as a complement to entrées such as fish, greens, or eggs. They make beautiful grits cakes, too.

Anson Mills quick grits, on the other hand, have the whole corn richness and creaminess of our Antebellum grits but are milled somewhat finer. (Particle size is, after all, relative—the rest of the industry would call these grits coarse or "old-fashioned.") While it is true that any grain milled fine will finish with slightly diminished texture and flavor compared with that same grain milled coarse, Anson Mills quick grits have advantages that more than make up for this deficit. For one thing, they can be on the table in 15 minutes. For another, their relatively fine, even texture allows for easy immersion in recipes for tamales, spoonbread, and other Southern or Latin casserole cookery.