Broken cereal grains, mostly white corn.
Although grits have become a culinary tradition in the southern United States, both the dish and its name were familiar in England long before Europeans had even heard of the New World. The ultimate source of grits was an Indo-European word pronounced something like greut, meaning to crush or to pound; this Indo-European word made its way through the Germanic language family and ended up in English as two words: groats, which appeared in the twelfth century, and referred to hulled, crushed grain used for making gruel; and grit, which appeared in the eighth century, and referred to the chaff left over after grinding grain. In the eleventh century, grit also came to refer to small particles of rock, and in the sixteenth century the plural form, grits, became established as the name of a porridge-like dish of boiled, ground grain. In the seventeenth century in the United States, grits also came to be known as hominy, a word of Native American origin. The source of hominy is the Algonquian name for a similar dish, appuminneonash, a word that derives from the Algonquian appwoon, meaning he bakes, and minneash, meaning grain. In the southern United States, the European and Native American names are often combined to form hominy grits.
This type of cornmeal is typically ground in a very rough manner and is often white in color. It is prepared by slowly cooking the meal in water or milk, typically in the upper vessel of a double boiler. The term itself is closely related to “groats,” and both originate from an archaic term denoting “fragment.”