Corn: Treasure Of The Americas

Only Townsends could make a twenty-minute video on corn, which I'm excited to watch every minute of. Cheers!

I'm Choctaw. The traditional way that we cook hominy -- nixtamalized whole corn kernels -- is by stewing it in an iron kettle over an open fire with shredded chicken and slices of salt pork. Delicious.

Originally the word "corn" was used for any grains. They didn't know what to call this new plant, so "corn", and that became it's name.

Nixtamalization specifically uses wood ash or any other strong alkaline. This process makes the hemicelulose ("glue" that holds husk on the grain) dissolve, making it easy to remove it. It also makes corn suitable for making dough which is very important for producing tortillas and other similar products and depending on what kind of alkaline product you use it may introduce also other minerals like calcium.

This new format where you guys switch back and forth is interesting, keeps the pacing dynamic and fresh

I'm in Québec, and to this day, we often colloquially call corn "Blé d'inde" (indian wheat)!

When I was a child, one of my favorite breakfasts was fried corn meal mush. The corn was prepared as you did. Then it was chilled in a loaf pan. The next day it was cut in slices and fried. Syrup was poured over it.

I live in Oregon and I've been growing Hooker's Blue corn for 20+ years. It's a short corn found on the Olympic Peninsula, basically a temperate rain forest. Makes really tasty corn cakes and grows fast. Very reliable. A beautiful purple indigo color.

When I was young, my mom used to cook us johnny cakes w/a chunk of jowl bacon on the side. It was a Saturday breakfast treat. I'd give almost anything to be able to share this Saturday breakfast with my mom again.

Incredibly, we Americans actually forgot the importance of nixtamalization in the 20th Century. When industrialized food preparation started, removing the germ of the corn grains also removed much of the nutrition. The result was that poor Southerners who depended on corn as their primary food suffered from pellagra which led to dementia, organ failure and death.

While I was in the military and taking a survival course two foods the instructor said you're blessed to have in a bad situation was corn and coconuts.

"Three sisters" farming and the foods from it could be a good follow-up to this video.

Adding corn to a barley beer is called a cream ale. It's awesome.

In the southwest the Hopi people can grow corn in completely dry environments, I think they call it dry farming.

Native Americans did use salt. They sometimes had rock salt deposits near them and dug out salt from those, or used brine springs and boiled the water down until they got salt in the bottom of the vessel they used for boiling. In addition they would burn plants that concentrate salt in their leaves and stems and extract salt from the ashes. They also traded throughout the entire continent and those who had a ready source for salt used salt to trade for other goods. Oddly enough, most Native Americans in what became the US didn't use sea water to make salt, even when they lived on or close the the coasts. Why, I haven't been able to find through Google.

In old Hungarian language corn was called Turkish wheat, as you mentioned. Although nowdays it is not used, people still understand this phrase.

The multi colored corn makes the most beautiful pastel hominy.

Best part of my Sunday mornings are watching these with my coffee.

I remember picking field corn one summer. My family had a lot of members with celiacs, so we used a lot of corn, and finding that farmer who would let us pick the ears off his silage corn was a God send. We shucked the ears and dried them all, then shelled them and stored the corn away. My friends in Malawi are facing a food shortage, because their maize crop has been affected by drought. It's amazing to see corn so important there, just like potatoes have become a staple in some parts of mountainous China.

To be clear, Corn was domesticated in Mesoamerica, near the Balsas river in Southwest Mexico; rather then Central America (which is below Mexico). The Ancient Americas channel has an excellent video, "Maize: The Engine of American Civilization", which covers it's initial domestication and some of it's use and cultural connotations in Prehispanic civilizations in Mesoamerica like the Aztec and Maya.