For anthropologists and historians, corn is a compelling study. As early as 2700 BC, maize and common beans were cultivated in what later would be Mexico. In 1492, as Columbus disembarked on the island now called Cuba, he was met by Carib Indians offering gifts of hospitality: one was tobacco and the other something called mais, which was later described as "well tasted, bak'd, dry'd and made into flour." Unknown to Columbus, at least 700 varieties of maize grew in the Western Hemisphere. He brought maize seeds back to Spain, where it was called "Indian corn" and grown in gardens as a curiosity.
In 1515, the Portuguese planted maize in China, where it was adopted more quickly and more widely than in Europe, Africa or other parts of the world. In 1529, vast fields of maize from America were grown in Turkey, from where the grain went to England as "Turkey corn." In 1749, pellagra, a vitamin-deficiency disease caused by a lack of niacin, also known as "corn sickness", was first recorded in Italy, where polenta made of cornmeal was a dietary staple in some areas. The name comes from the Italian words pelle agra. Symptoms included diarrhea, dementia and, ultimately, death. Although corn contains niacin, it is bound to other molecules that cannot be digested in the digestive tract of humans. Centuries ago, the Aztecs and Incas, whose diets were high in corn, did not suffer from this disease because they learned to presoak their maize in limestone, lye or wood ashes prior to cooking, which broke the chemical bond, thus freeing the niacin for absorption by the body and protecting against pellagra - something the Anglo-Saxons did not follow. By the end of the next century, Egypt and other African countries where peasants lived mainly on cornmeal had suffered pellagra epidemics.
Corn was believed by Europeans to have unearthly powers (it rises to heaven as it grows) ever since Columbus brought the first samples back to Spain from the Caribbean in 1496. Early Spanish churchmen, for example, assumed that the intake of raw kernels would cure souls troubled by the devil. Martyrs suspected of shameful associations were often force-fed a mixture of corn and water, and made to sit naked in the hot sun until the mixture, which expanded inside them in the heat, either flushed out their sins or ripped them open. Until hybrids were developed in the 1920s, the corn grown in the U.S. Corn Belt was what was known as "dent corn", with orange, yellow, red or white kernels, each with a dent or dimple on top, its ears and kernels larger than any other corn. The corn the Indians grew was the same corn grown by the Pilgrims, mostly soft, flour corn, its kernels generally white, the major variety in the South until hybrid corn was introduced. Sweet corn was unknown until 1779, when Richard Bagnal, an officer in General John Sullivan's expedition against the Iroquois, found it grown by Indians along the Susquehanna River in western New York. Bagnal carried seeds of it back East, but it was not until the 1850s that sweet corn began to replace field corn on North American tables. Corn is one of the least nutritionally complete grains. See also flint corn, popcorn.
From The Food Encyclopedia by Jacques Rolland and Carol Sherman
