SIMON'S FOOD SCHOOL:
Stuff You Didn't Know You Didn't Know About Food
The Origins of Corn
I love using corn in so many of my recipes. I use it to make soups, to grill and eat with butter, to make purees to serve with fish and, as you can see in this month’s recipe, to make this deliciously spicy corn masala. How ever you like to cook it, I am sure that most people would agree that there are few things more delicious than late summer corn.
For an ingredient that is so ubiquitous and something we often take totally for granted when we see it in our stores, corn (or maize, to give it its true name) is one of the oldest crop known to man. Along with the ability to domesticate animals, the harvesting of crops like corn was one of the reasons humans were able to transfer from a nomadic existence to one where humans became capable of building urban environments and start the beginnings of great civilizations.
The corn we eat today is quite different from the earliest plants, which were planted and harvested nearly 9,000 years ago in what is now Mexico. It is now believed that it has its origins in a wild grass called Teosinte, and men began to notice that some plants would grow more rapidly and produce more kernels than others and began selecting seeds from these plants to plant themselves the next year. This was the earliest form of farming, and over time this nascent form of selective breeding began to develop larger kernels and bring the corn closer to what is so familiar with us today.
As populations migrated over the next generations, the growing of corn found its way into what is now the Southwestern part of the United States, and from there, to the rest of the country, where it became a staple for many of the native tribes.
When the Europeans first arrived in Central and South America in the 15th Century, they saw corn was the major source of nutrition for many of the tribes they encountered and took samples of it back with them to their home countries. At first, they used it to create feed for cows, but soon it began to enter the diets of the Europeans themselves. Added to which, with the opening up of trade routes and the beginning of colonization, corn soon found itself becoming a staple in West Africa. There are even records from the 1600s of it being cultivated in China.
When the first settlers from Europe arrived in America, tribes, such as the Wampanoag and the Iroquois, showed them methods for growing and cooking with corn and they began to make dishes such as “Hasty Pudding” and breads such as the cornbread that is still so popular today. Without these sustaining dishes, survival would have been even more unlikely than it already was for these new arrivals.
The United States still produces the most corn of any nation in the world, at around 13.601 Million bushels. However, only a small percentage (around 14%) goes towards the production of food and beverages. The rest is converted to ethanol, used in animal feed or exported to other countries. Despite the small percentage used for food, it still represents a massive amount of corn, which shows that corn still plays a huge part in our daily diets.
So, if you do give this months recipe a try, remember when you bite into those sweet yellow kernels that without this all too familiar crop, we probably wouldn’t be here at all.
