by Rebecca Rupp
Almost the first act perpetrated by the arriving Mayflower colonists on the resident Indians was to pinch a stash of seed corn. To be fair, it was less an act of malice than of desperation. When the ship dropped anchor off Cape Cod on November 11, 1620, its passengers were hardly prepared for the awfulness of the New England winter, which would leave half of them dead before the spring of 1621. Already in early November it was so cold that the blowing sea spray froze on their jackets and encased them in ice — and to make it all worse, their food stores were running low.
Then — “by gods good providence” — a mission of exploration, led by the blustery Captain Miles Standish, discovered a buried store of seed corn, which they promptly appropriated, salving their consciences by vowing to make restitution to the rightful owners later. Apparently they never did, which did them no good in their future relations with the Wampanoags. And in truth, it’s hard to imagine what restitution Standish and company might have made. There’s no substitute for seed corn. Seed corn, saved each year for the next planting season, was the difference between tribal survival and starvation. To this day, “to eat one’s seed corn” is an act of utter hopelessness.
The importance of corn to people is attested to in part by our relationship’s longevity. Based on recent genetic analyses, scientists now guess that corn has been under cultivation for nearly 9,000 years, first domesticated in southern Mexico from teosinte, an annual wild grass native to Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras.
The earliest domesticated corn, though a giant agricultural step for mankind, was a pathetic production compared to the juicy cobs of today. In 1948 Herbert W. Dick, a Harvard anthropologist, unearthed primitive one- to two-inch cobs from beneath six feet of accumulated prehistoric garbage in the Bat Cave of New Mexico. Dated to 3,500 years ago by radiocarbon analysis, the Bat Cave corn held the corn age record until the 1960s, when samples of a punier and even more primitive 5,000-year-old corn — with cobs the size of pencil erasers — were discovered in the Tehuacan Valley of Mexico by Richard MacNeish of Boston University.
Since then the world’s oldest corn has taken a 4,000-year leap back in time. Today the record holder consists of a collection of 8,700-year-old maize starch granules, scraped from prehistoric grinding tools and winkled out of crevices in the caves and rock shelters of Mexico’s Central Balsas River Valley.
Such authentic early specimens replaced a previous corn find, a puzzlingly modern-looking ear of petrified maize that turned up in the early twentieth century in a curio shop in Cuzco, Peru. The ear, believed to be thousands of years old, was reverently dubbed Zea antiqua and donated to the Smithsonian Institution. There, in the 1930s, it was gingerly cut open and found to be made of pottery clay. Archaeologists guess that it was a baby’s rattle.
Modern corn (maize) is a grass, a member of the Poaceae family, a collection of some 600 genera and 10,000 species, among them wheat, barley, oats, rice, sugarcane, and bamboo. As grasses go, however, corn is indisputably odd. Flemish herbalist Rembert Dodoens, hitting the nail neatly on the head in 1578, described corn as “a marvelous strange plant, nothing resembling any other kind of grayne.” The “marvelous strange” was one of the rare points upon which contesting corn scientists have universally agreed. Nothing that looks much like corn is found in the wild, and nobody, for most of its history, knew where it came from.
Corn has always been a mystery, which perhaps is why so many myths surround it. The Navajos claimed that corn came from a magical turkey hen, which dropped an ear of blue corn while en route to the morning star. The Rhode Island Indians say the original corn was dropped by a supernatural crow. The Seminoles say that corn was brought by Fas-ta-chee, the dwarfish corn god, who carried it in a sack on his back, and to the Toltecs, corn was the gift of Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent. Some tribes of the American Southwest say that corn was distributed to people by the flute-playing fertility god Kokopelli, as he traveled from village to village.
Prehistoric farmers, determinedly selecting for larger, meatier ears, had developed an impressive two to three hundred different corn breeds by the time Columbus reached San Salvador, including all of the major classes of corn grown today: pop, flint, flour, dent, and sweet. The five classes differ primarily in the makeup of the corn endosperm, the food storage organ of the kernel, whose food content ranges from the iron-hard starch of pop and flint corns to the soft chewy sugar of sweet corn. Most corn kernels contain around 70 percent starch, stored in tiny granules that accumulate gradually, layer by layer, around a central nucleus.
In popcorn, these granules are embedded in a tough matrix of protein. Popcorn pops because when heated the internal water reaches the boiling point, vaporizes, and rapidly expands in volume, upping the pressure on both this protein matrix and the kernel’s outer hull. When the pressure becomes insupportable, the matrix abruptly gives way and the kernel explodes — literally everting, or turning itself inside out. From this startling property comes popcorn’s scientific name, Zea mays ssp. everta. Proper popping depends on water content: optimal is 13–14.5 percent. Popped, most popcorn swells to more than thirty times its starting size.
The white crispy popcorn innards, of which Americans collectively crunch 17 billion quarts per year, consist mostly of cooked starch. Popcorn was breakfast food in colonial New England, eaten with milk and maple sugar; and the Pennsylvania Dutch, who also gave us Christmas cookies and apple strudel, cooked up chicken-corn soups with popcorn floating on the top to give them extra oomph.
By the mid-nineteenth century, popcorn was no longer a mealtime staple, but it was still such a popular munchie that vendors were hawking it on the city streets. Popcorn balls, coated with molasses, caramel, or honey, moved in as candy treats in the 1870s, and soon ranked right up there with such old-time favorites as vinegar candy and saltwater taffy. Two entire buildings at the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876 were devoted to selling popcorn, which was washed down with Arctic Soda Water, elegantly dispensed from colored marble soda-water fountains with silver fittings.
Popcorn is an extra-hard form of flint corn, the somewhat larger high-protein, high-starch corn that predominated in the northeastern United States and Canada centuries before the Europeans arrived. Today it’s usually colored flint corn that people use to decorate their front doors in autumn, calling it “Indian corn.” Early native growers purposefully selected and bred their crops for color, producing, by the time the Europeans arrived, red, blue, black, yellow, white, and multicolored corns. Intrigued colonists continued these breeding practices and eventually grew ears of every conceivable hue, including purple, maroon, amber, chocolate brown, lemon yellow, copper, and orange.
Color in corn is like fingerpaint: it’s a matter of mixing. Each kernel, along with a nascent embryo, contains a stuffing of endosperm, starchy food for the infant corn plant. Surrounding the endosperm is a one- to two-cell-thick starch-packed layer called the aleurone, and topping that is the protective pericarp, which consists mostly of cellulose and is the part of the kernel that tends to get stuck annoyingly between the teeth after a corn-on-the-cob orgy. All of the above come in different colors, and the perceived color of a corn kernel is the sum of all three.
Popular fashion today narrow-mindedly limits most eating corns to yellow or white — which shades, plus orange, result from the deposition of xanthophyll and carotene pigments in the endosperm. Gaudier colors generally reside in the pericarp or aleurone. Kculli, an ancient near-black corn used by the Peruvian Indians to make dye and colored beer, has a dark red pericarp, a purple or brown aleurone, and a white endosperm.
An aleurone-based blue accounts for blue corn, prized by the natives of the American Southwest. Francisco Coronado found the Pueblo peoples growing it in the course of his ill-fated trek in search of the Seven Cities of Gold in 1540. Today it still puts the blue in blue corn chips and blue tortillas. Blue corn is a flour corn, which differs from its flinty relatives by a mutation at a single locus on corn chromosome 2. This resulted in a corn with s
oft endosperm, easily ground into meal.
Most common now in the fields of the modern Corn Belt is dent corn, a horticultural compromise between flint and flour, which contains a mix of hard and soft starch. The distinction between hard and soft starches lies in the makeup of the starch molecules. The hard stuff consists of straight chains of linearly linked sugar molecules and is scientifically known as amylose; soft starch, composed of branched chains, is known as amylopectin. In dent corn, the amylopectin is concentrated at the crown of the mature kernel. As the kernel dries, this soft starch shrinks, forming a characteristic dimple — or dent.
Unusual among vegetables, corn doesn’t sweeten with age. “Green” or unripe corn is sweet because it hasn’t yet had a chance to convert its natural sugars into starch. Ripening corn, unlike practically everything else in the garden, becomes progressively less tasty as it approaches maturity. The corn we know as “sweet” corn is a mutant, forcibly interrupted in the sugar-to-starch conversion process such that it stays permanently, youthfully, sweet. People, unsurprisingly, love it.
Sweet corn was grown in prehistoric Mexico and Peru, and by many of the North American Indian tribes. Most sources state that the pioneers didn’t manage to get their hands on it until 1779, when Richard Bagnal, an officer in General John Sullivan’s destructive expedition against the Iroquois, nabbed a sample from a cornfield on the Susquehanna River in western New York. If so, it spread fast: by 1810, Thomas Jefferson records growing “shriveled” corn — a sweet variety — at Monticello.
Since it’s higher in sugar than starch, sweet corn produces translucent wrinkled kernels analogous to the equally wrinkled seeds of the high-sugar pea. At least three mutations govern sweetness in corn, and the earlier a mutation acts in the sugar-to-starch conversion pathway, the sweeter the resulting corn. Sweeter than sweet is supersweet corn — its real name — governed by a mutation called shrunken 2, identified in 1950 by researcher J. R. Laughman at the University of Illinois.
Sweetness increased yet again in the 1960s when another Illinois scientist, A. M. Rhodes, discovered a positively sinful three-way cross that he dubbed sugary enhanced (se), which is the closest corn gets to chocolate. Marketed se corns include cultivars in the Everlasting Heritage series — Kandy Korn, for example — and the sweet bicolor Burgundy Delight; and it may be these that Garrison Keillor had in mind when he remarked that sex is good, but not as good as fresh sweet corn.
The se mutation not only makes corn supersweet, but also enables it to hang onto its sugar content much longer after harvest than is usual. Classically, sugar starts going downhill the minute the corn is picked — hence the traditional adage that you can stroll out to the corn patch as slowly as you please, but you’d better run like the devil back to the house. Mark Twain took that one step further, recommending that the boiling cooking pot be taken right out to the garden. Actually, that’s unnecessarily drastic; corn experts today grant pickers a twenty-minute grace period before the deterioration begins.
The sugar in corn provides a fine food source for yeasts, and since prehistoric times corn has been used to make alcohol, first as beer and wine, and later as whiskey. In the starchier types of corn, the starch molecules must be broken down into their component sugars before the yeasts can go to work, which problem the ancient Peruvians solved by chewing, thus reducing cornstarch to sugar with the human salivary enzyme amylase. The resultant masticated mash was fermented to yield an alcoholic beverage called chicha, which was not only enthusiastically drunk but also sprinkled in the fields at corn-planting time to ensure a good harvest. Post-sprinkling, the imperial Inca himself started the sowing by breaking the soil with a golden pickaxe.
High-powered corn liquors appeared in America with the establishment of the Scotch-Irish whiskey distilleries in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania — though the first known American whiskey maker seems to have been George Thorpe, a preacher and physician, who was turning corn into alcohol in Virginia by 1620. (“Wee have found a waie to make soe good drink of Indian corne I have divers times refused to drinke good stronge English beare and chose to drinke that,” he confided in a letter to a cousin back home.) Unfortunately, Thorpe’s endeavors came to an end abruptly in 1622 when he was killed by the Powhatan Indians. An inventory of his belongings included “a copper still, old,” valued at three pounds of tobacco.
By the next century, corn distilleries were common enough on family farms that Alexander Hamilton, strapped for funds in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, decided to levy a tax on homemade spirits. The tax impinged on whiskey profits to such an extent that the incensed distillers of Pennsylvania banded together in the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. They created local havoc, burning tax collectors’ homes, tarring and feathering unlucky collectors, and eventually occupying Pittsburgh. George Washington countered by calling out fifteen thousand federal troops, which effectively ended the hostilities — though many unrepentant rebels subsequently packed up their stills and moved to Kentucky, where they began making bourbon.
Shortly afterward, Washington himself became a whiskey man. In 1797, with the help of his whiskey-savvy Scotch-Irish overseer John Anderson, he established a distillery at Mount Vernon. By 1798, he had five stills and a boiler and was cranking out an annual 11,000 gallons of whiskey, based on a mix of corn and rye. Even Thomas Jefferson, who much preferred wine, started making corn whiskey at Monticello in 1813.
John C. Fremont carried whiskey, ostensibly as antifreeze for his surveying instruments, during his western explorations of the 1840s, and whiskey seems to have been among the “necessaries of life” for the midcentury California mountain man. A list of provender required by a party for an eight-day trip through the mountains, reported Hutchings’ California Magazine in 1860, included eight pounds of potatoes, nine pounds of onions, eleven pounds of crackers, seven pounds of cheese, two bottles of pepper sauce, and fourteen bottles (plus a small keg) of whiskey.
The South mourned the absence of whiskey during the Civil War, when the North captured the Tennessee copper mines and cut off the supply of metal for kettles and condensing tubes, although the deprivation occasionally worked in the Confederates’ favor. Among the best of contemporaneous corn-whiskey stories appears in the after-action report of a Yankee major, Isaac Lynde, who in July 1862 was commanding a detachment of soldiers en route to Fort Stanton in New Mexico. His men turned out to have canteens full of whiskey snitched from the medical stores in the dispensary and, being in no state either to stand and fight or to run away, were promptly captured by patrolling Texans. The humiliated Major Lynde would doubtless have thrown in his lot with Edward Enfield, whose 1866 Treatise on Indian Corn condemned whiskey, stating that corn “like some other best gifts of the Deity, [has] been perverted to base and injurious uses.”
When not drunk in “spirituous liquors,” corn was consumed in succotash, fritters, hoecakes, pone, hominy, and hasty pudding — the last so ubiquitous that colonial poet Joel Barlow wrote a poem in three excruciating cantos in honor of it. (“My morning incense and my evening meal / The sweets of Hasty Pudding. Come, dear bowl / Glide o’er my palate and inspire my soul.”) The Indians made their own brand of hasty pudding, flavored with dried blueberries and grasshoppers. Benjamin Franklin, who liked it for breakfast, flavored his with honey and nutmeg, and the French, who adopted it as a political gesture during the American Revolution, flavored theirs with cognac.
Not everyone was a corn fan. Josiah Atkins, trudging through Virginia with the Continental Army in 1781, wrote home that want of provisions had reduced him to eating what “people in these parts call Hoe cakes . . . which makes my trials insupportable,” and British visitor Frances Trollope, in her best-selling Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), dismisses corn: “They eat Indian corn in a great variety of forms, but in my opinion all bad.”
Even so, corn was historically and enthusiastically eaten as corn on the cob — a practice that arose, according to corn scientist Walton Galinat, from “man’s instinctive
desire to eat directly with his bare hands.” Man may have wanted to, but the socially censorious did their best to see that he didn’t. “The greatest drawback is the way in which it is necessary to eat it,” commented Harriet Martineau in 1835.
The persnickety Charles Day, author of Hints on Etiquette and the Usages of Society with a Glance at Bad Habits (1844), writes, “It is not elegant to gnaw Indian corn. The kernels should be scored with a knife, scraped off into the plate, and then eaten with a fork. Ladies should be particularly careful how they manage so ticklish a dainty, lest the exhibition rub off a little desirable romance.” Emily Post lists corn on the cob under “Graduating Tests in Table Manners,” as one of the hurdles for the inept diner, along with asparagus, artichokes, bread and butter, and terrapin bones. In fact, Emily throws up her gloved hands regarding corn:
“Corn on the cob could be eliminated so far as ever having to eat it in formal company is concerned. … if you insist on eating it at home or in a restaurant, to attack it with as little ferocity as possible, is perhaps the only direction to be given, since at best it is an ungraceful performance and to eat it greedily a horrible sight!”
For all the appeal of corn cuisine, corn has its nutritional drawbacks. None of the cereal grains is a complete protein source, and corn is no exception. It is deficient in both the essential amino acids lysine and tryptophan, and not too forthcoming with the vitamin niacin (B3), which in corn kernels is tightly bound to another molecule and thus is unavailable to hopeful eaters. A lack of niacin — the name was coined to avoid the nasty cigarette-smoking connotations of the scientifically correct nicotinic acid — leads to a deficiency disease called pellagra.
Pellagra arrived in Europe neck and neck with American corn. It was first described in Spain in 1735 by physician Gaspar Casal, who called it “Asturian leprosy;” and sufferers were sometimes known as the “butterfly people” from the butterfly-shaped rash that first appeared across the nose and face before spreading to the rest of the body in hideous and painful scabs. (The name pellagra is Italian, meaning “rough skin.”) Jeffrey and William Hampl, in a 1997 paper in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, argue that the symptoms of pellagra — sun sensitivity, tongue edema, dementia, and a prolonged wasting death — were the source of the original European vampire legends. Dracula, in other words, simply needed niacin.