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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