Mutable Maize
“You can give an overview of the history of corn,” said John T. Edge in his confident, persuasive voice, ignoring my demurral that in spite of lots of experience with corn in Mexico, I was an expert neither on corn (maize to non-Americans) in America nor on the American South. So I meekly accepted the challenge.
But John was not finished. “It would be nice,” he added, “since yours will be the last talk if you could weave in references to all the earlier papers as well.”
Thus in mid October 2016, I turned up as the Fall Symposium of the Southern Foodways Alliance on “Corn as Symbol, Sustenance, and Problem” in Oxford, Mississippi. For years, I’d wanted to go to one of the SFA meetings, legendary for the quality of their papers, the excellent food, and the general good fellowship and bonhomie. The event lived up to expectations and if you ever get the chance, do go. And if that’s not possible, spend a few minutes on their web site to get a sense of the wealth of their activities: films, podcasts, scholarships, publications, oral histories, and more.
It turned out I loved doing the research for my presentation. In brief, I argued that attitudes to maize in the American colonies and United States have been through four stages.
First, among the early settlers puzzlement at how to understand this grain that was so different from the wheat, oats, barley, millet and rye of Europe.
Second, from the colonial period to just after the Civil War, pride in corn as plentiful, nutritious, Protestant, and republican food, perfect for yeoman farmers and appropriate to all those who rejected European monarchies based on low-yielding, finicky, wheat.
Urging Americans during World War I to eat corn so that wheat could be sent to soldiers in Europe inadvertently reinforced the idea that corn was inferior to wheat.
Third, once wheat became abundant and inexpensive in the late nineteenth century thanks to the industrialization of agriculture and milling and inexpensive steam transport, disdain outside the South for corn as not as nutritious as wheat (no gluten hence low in protein). It was not a good food for an expanding nation and empire. It was the resort of the the poor who could not afford anything better (and animals). Once corn was linked to the terrible deficiency disease, pellagra, this attitude hardened further.
Fourth, in the twenty first century, a growing disdain for all grains as mere “carbs.”
Should you want more, here’s the very nicely edited video, The Mutability of Maize.
Sadly, there wasn’t time to link maize to think with maize to cook. There’s another whole story there and one that has barely been told. It says a lot about different national attitudes to maize than in Mexico there’s a wealth of material on the role of maize in Mexican culture while in the United States there’s very little on the role of corn in American culture.
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I benefitted greatly from Sandy Oliver and Leni Sorensen‘s thoughts on hominy, samp, and nixtamalization north of the border.
The secondary sources I found particularly useful were these.
Nicholas P. Hardeman, Shucks, Shocks, and Hominy Blocks: Corn as a Way of Life in Pioneer America (Louisiana State University Press, 1981).
Betty Fussell, The Story of Corn (Knopf, 1992).
John Egerton, Southern Food (University of North Carolina Press, 1993).
Anthony Boutard, Beautiful Corn (New Society, 2012).
Adrian Miller, Soul Food (University of North Carolina, 2013)
Cynthia Clampitt, Midwest Maize (University of Illinois Press, 2015).
- My 2016 Books on Food History and Politics
- Heavy Lifting: The Potato, the Poor, and Pleasure in Ireland
Fascinating. Thank you for posting the video. Do you think that since knowldege of the process of nixtamalization did not travel to Europe with maize, it’s subsequent association with pellagra was a major factor in the negative view of corn relative to wheat from then on? If nixtamaliztion had been understood, would Europeans have been eating tortillas?
Thanks Zora. I don’t think Europeans would have eaten tortillas, just because once you have nixtamalized the corn you have to grind it wet. You can’t do that on a rotary grindstone. Europeans were not about to get down on their knees and grind on a saddlestone/simple grindstone, or at least that’s what it seems. Even in the United States, nixtamalized corn was always eaten as the whole grain (hominy). Now Mexicans have ways of mechanically grinding nixtamal but it was a tricky technology to develop and required from the mid nineteenth to the mid twentieth century.
I have experienced firsthand the challenges of mechanically grinding wet nixtamal, when making masa from scratch. After failed experiments with various grain mills, I settled on two methods. First, when making masa para tamales, which can be a little bit coarse, I use my Vitamix blender’s wet jar, starting the motor on high with the blender jar empty, then dropping the kernels in from the top, a few at a time. This is time consuming, but less labor intensive than the metate. For tortillas, I dry the nixtamal in a low oven, then grind it in the Vitamix dry jar, which is meant for grinding whole grains into flour. I am essentially making my own masa harina, which i then rehydrate to make tortillas. I have since seen in action a type of wet grinder made in India, which I have been told also works on nixtamal. However, they are priced at $300 and up–a big gamble to take, without absolute certainty that it will do the job.
Interesting, Zora. As you doubtless know, in Mexico some families use a screw on hand mill rather like a meat grinder. It’s still a lot of work. And I know people who bought an expensive single family size electric grinder, which they said made the whole house vibrate and tended to throw grains all over the place. I’ve never heard of anyone trying your method–may be a reason to buy a Vitamix! You find your homemade nixtamal preferable to the commercial, I take it? And where do you get your maize?
Finding the right kind of field corn has been a challenge. When I would visit my family in California, I would go to a tortilleria and ask them to sell me some of their dried, as yet untreated corn, and bring perhaps fifteen pounds back to DC in my suitcase. Now that my parents are both gone, I haven’t been back to California. Finding sources of corn online seems to involve buying at least fifty pounds at a time. And I found a tortilla factory near DC that made masa from scratch. they wouldn’t sell me any of their their dried corn, but I could buy five to ten pounds of freshly made masa preparada from them, for making tamales or tortillas. Now that I have moved to Maine, I’ve resorted to buying dried pozole (nixtamalized) corn from Rancho Gordo and grinding it into masa harina–the freshness of the grinding makes a big difference, I’ve found, though not such a flavor benefit as using freshly cooked nixtamal. I think I may have found a source for dried corn: a nearby farm that grows flint corn and mills and sells cornmeal. I’m going to see whether they will sell me some of their corn before they mill it, and find out if it tastes right when cooked with cal.
Sounds familiar!
Europeans do eat tortillas. Why we would market a kind of wheat pancakes as ‘tortillas’ and why anyone apparently sane would buy those is totally beyond me but these abominations actually do exist and are easy to find in North Europe.
Rats, in these parts at least, are way wiser creatures. They think deep frozen corn kernels are better than ice cream.
We PostSoviets have our own problems with maize. In the 1950s Nikita Krushchov saw the US got rich growing corn and gave the order to cultivate this wonder crop all over the USSR. Although he earned the nickname Kukuruznik (Corn Man) maize is definitely not known to thrive near the Polar Circle so unfortunately … just another Grand Soviet Project.
(BTW Comrade Kukuruznik firmly believed all good Soviet citizens would prefer communal cafeteria meals to time consuming, humiliating, unsanitary, and nonscientific home cooking. Thus Khrushchov era apartements are relatively well planned and honestly built but unless one suffers from extreme anorexia the kitchens are places to painfully squeeze oneself in with no room to turn around. The guy was one extreme eejit.)
Ganna, I think there’s a confusion here about what kind of tortillas are meant. Zora Margolis was referring to corn tortillas, which are made from corn that has been soaked in an alkaline solution and then ground to a wet paste. Flour tortillas are simply a wheat flour flat bread.
Thanks for the further information about maize in Khrushchev’s time. I did include a poster from the period in my talk but did not know about his nickname!
1) Irony misguided. The package is clearly labelled TORTILLAS. Find the fine print, squint at it for a while, and oh yeah the contents is all wheat and no corn. Some health or novelty stores do sell real tortillas here but the prize usually puts me off…
2) Yes. From ‘kukuruza’, maize in Russian. Due to his heroic effort maize, hereabouts, still symbolizes everything that was wrong with Soviet agriculture thus ‘eat corn, send wheat to soldiers’ somehow struck a chord. As for Soviet agriculture, it managed to get everything wrong. Some things just got wrong worse than ever. You would get a most representative case of really wrong by googling Holodomor but beware, both Mexico and Estonia (and some 20 other countries) consider it officially a case of genocide while the mild, gentle UN says it was a crime against humanity. And Russia says ‘natural disaster, not enough documents, we done nothing’. Using food distribution to decimate a whole nation would be food history stuff, right?
Ganna, I have a Russian-speaking food historian friend who is working on Soviet food history right now. I talked to him briefly a couple of weeks ago and when his book appears in five or six years’ time it should be the best treatment yet.
Dear Rachel,
I just watched your Mutability of Maize video, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I had never grasped all the political and social implications in the wheat vs maize argument over the centuries. I guess that the current fake news epidemic demonizing foods with which one does not agree is not as new as I thought.
Nevertheless, I think there are some agricultural issues that override the socio-political ones. In the South, wheat was impossible to grow until a few decades ago, when wheat varieities resistant to wheat diseases in the South became available. It is these new varieties that made wheat cultivation practical in the South. Before then, one either ate corn, or did without.
Likewise, as one goes west, the land gets drier. Eventually, one gets to where it is too dry for corn, but wheat will still grow– that is where the amber waves of grain were planted because they could and would grow there when corn could not.
Corn yields have also risen dramatically due to the advent of hybrids. Wheat yields have simply not kept up with corn yields, which is why starch from corn will be much cheaper than starch from wheat.
See cool graph at https://www.quora.com/If-you-compare-the-yield-of-one-acre-of-wheat-with-the-yield-of-one-acre-of-rice-which-can-support-more-people
Wayne, First, thanks for the cool graph. I’ve been looking for something like that for ages. And second, thanks for the comments on the agriculture, which are really important. I think there was a period when the South had to depend on what because it was all that would grow there. But at some point in the second half of the nineteenth century, with railroads, the expansion of Midwest maize, and the power milling of maize, as I understand it, much of the South began depending on store-bought corn meal from big millers in the Midwest.
I really appreciate that an ag scientist like you takes an interest in these issues. There’s a huge and complex story of the battle of the grains that no one has yet told and that needs to take into account yield, growing conditions, processing, side products, and political and nutritional factors. Quite a lot of skills!
And you have one of the tidiest offices I have ever seen, judging by your web page.
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