I found this on the internets
(might not be safe for work)
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-food-that-Americans-call-‘grits’
Maize, what Americans call corn, doesn’t keep indefinitely when dried, because the germ is still alive and will sprout. Also, if you have a diet that consists almost entirely of maize, you will develop pellagra because your gut cannot absorb the niacin in the maize.
So about 1200 BC, the native Americans in Mexico discovered a technique that would allow dried maize to keep, and made it more nutritious, although obviously they didn’t know about that. It’s called nixtamalization, from an Aztec word, nixtamall. If you soak the maize kernels in water mixed with a small amount of an alkali, lye or lime (the mineral, not the fruit), the hull comes off and it swells up. The germ is killed, so it won’t sprout. You can obtain dilute lye by running water through wood ashes. (This is also how the early pioneers made lye soap.) This practice spread all over eastern North America.
Doing this yields a substance called hominy, which is an old Powhatan word for prepared maize. The kernels swell up and they take on a distinctive tangy flavor from the lye or lime. Also, it undergoes a chemical reaction that makes the niacin accessible to human digestion. It’s not to everyone’s taste, but I like it a lot. You can then boil it and eat it directly, or dry it and keep it.
This is cooked hominy. You can buy it in cans and just heat it up. It’s typically either white or yellow, but this is a mixture:
If you dry the raw hominy and then grind it up, you get a sort of cornmeal which we call grits or sometimes hominy grits. It somewhat resembles polenta, except that it has the distinctive hominy flavor and doesn’t require so much work to cook.
To eat it, you reconstitute the grits with boiling water just as you do with oatmeal porridge.
Some like it rather wet and sloppy,
but I prefer it fairly stiff. It’s not really suitable for sweet additions, but it’s wonderful with salt, pepper, and butter. It’s normally eaten at breakfast:
As a side dish at dinner, cheese is often melted into it as well. This was invented in the American south, and is still very popular there. But you can find it right across the United States now.
As with polenta, you can also pour it into a pan, let it dry out a bit, then cut it into slices and roast or fry them, which adds a richer flavor.