Rachel Laudan

The Gritter Board: Or How to Process Half-Dried Corn

Last week the latest issue of The Millstone: Journal of the Kentucky Old Mill Association arrived in my mail box. It included a reprint of an article by Martin Brooks from The American Miller 43 (1915), 545. Called “For Home Consumption Only” Brooks described how mountain people turned to the gritter board–which he identified as “between and mill and a quern”–when streams ran dry and mills could not run.

[The gritter board] was made by punching a piece of tin full of small holes, turning the rough side up and tacking it to a board. An ear of corn is rubbed back and forth on the board until it is reduced into cornmeal.

Directed behind the “gritter board” will be noticed a cornmeal sieve which produces the “finished product” after it leaves the board. This particular sieve was made by stretching the skin of a groundhog over a frame and burning holes in it with a heated wire.

In the dry seasons these “gritter boards” fill a great need because, without them, it would be necessary to go many miles to a mill [on a stream that is still flowing].

It is no small task, however, to make enough cornmeal on a “gritter board” to supply three daily meals for a large family.

I am fascinated with food processing particularly the processing of grains. As a result, the more I thought about this the more puzzled I became. Both tree trunk mortars and steel rotary mills were alternatives to water mills and surely more effective than a gritter board. Indeed it seemed unlikely that a piece of tin tacked to a board could do much to turn hard, dry corn into grits.

The photograph was obviously posed. Was the author simply hasty in his conclusions? Was he being taken for a ride as country smugglers (moonrakers) in Wiltshire, the English county where I grew up, tricked the excise men by saying they were trying to rake the moon from the pond in in which they had hidden barrels of brandy. Because the excise men assumed country people were slow, the smugglers got away with their ploy.

Well, luckily there are search engines. First I tried gritter board. It turns out that gritter boards were used seasonally. “When the corn is too hard for the table and too soft for the cow,” Mama used to say,” it’s just right for making gritted bread.” So reports Sidney Saylor Farr in My Appalachia (2007). She describes how her father opened up a lard bucket, took a punched holes with a number 10 nail, and fastened it to a board. The cornbread made with the semisoft corn tasted quite different from cornbread from cornmeal.

Gritter bread turned up yet more. This blog post on milling corn from the Western Carolina University has nice drawings of gritter boards. The blog Blind Pig & an Acorn gives instructions on How to Make Gritted Bread from Fresh Corn. And not surprisingly gritter bread is also called fresh corn bread.

In short, Martin Brooks had, perhaps because dry spells often occur in late summer when corn is drying out, jumped to the conclusion that this was the standard resort of households when grist mills were not running. Or perhaps there was something to it. One source mentioned that if you soaked dried corn overnight it was possible to process it on a gritter board.

Viewed from another perspective, it’s evidence that earlier often-heavily carbohydrate diets were not as monotonous as we might imagine. In Mexico, too, the various stages of corn ripening had their attendant culinary treats.

I’d love to try gritter bread but the corn on sale at the farmers’ markets is too young and far too super sweet. And why would anyone want to grow old fashioned corn and bring it to market for a treat that is only available for a week or two a year?

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6 thoughts on “The Gritter Board: Or How to Process Half-Dried Corn

    1. Rachel Laudan Post author

      Grits and gritter have to be related but then there are all those groats words lurking in the background. Our grain terminology is so much more restricted than one it was.

  1. Tom Kelchner

    Great article! I especially like the line “…it’s evidence that earlier often-heavily carbohydrate diets were not as monotonous as we might imagine.” If you want to experiment, here in Pennsylvania there is a product called John Copes Dried Corn. It’s basically dehydrated sweet corn. I grew up eating it. You could probably grind it up in a blender or food processor if you want it finer. You can get it here: https://www.pageneralstore.com/category/CopesCorn Walmart’s web site lists it but says they’re out of it at the moment.

    1. Rachel Laudan Post author

      Thank you Tom. And thank you for awaking dim memories of once buying Copes Dried Corn and finding it delicious. This must have been thirty or forty years ago with we lived in Pennsylvania. A good reason to try it again.

  2. Jacqui Newling

    Fascinating Rachel. I’m exploring the use of ‘Indian corn’ / maize in early colonial Australia for my PhD. Military historian John Rees has been really a useful source for camp cookery, including soldiers in the late 1700s punching holes in the side of tin kettles (we call them billy cans) to grate corn from the cob. Regards, Jacqui

    1. Rachel Laudan Post author

      Hi Jacqui, No one is more knowledgable than John Rees when it comes to colonial American military food.
      does he say whether this was fresh or dried corn? I really look forward to your thesis because maize is so hard for wheat and barley eaters to come to terms with. The techniques are just so different even if you try to grind it like wheat.

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