Wait! say my British readers (or those who have been reading books by British medievalists). There are all these references to "corn"! Yes, but they are using the word "corn" in its broad sense of "grain." They certainly had grain (wheat, barley, rye primarily) in the Middle Ages. But there was no maize, corn in the American sense, Zea mays to be scientific.
I thought I would blog about corn because it's an excellent example of how our diet and the diet of medieval people differed. (They didn't have potatoes or tomatoes either, as I have previously discussed.) Corn is a New World plant.
Both North American and South American indigenous peoples cultivated maize. It is descended from a wild grass-like plant, teosinte, with which only a few mutations on key genes produced cobs rather than just little tufts of seeds, and didn't have the seeds scatter spontaneously when ripe. It has been cultivated in Mexico for at least 9000 years, perhaps eaten originally as popcorn (though without "butter flavor" or movies). It was well established throughout the Americas when Europeans first arrived. For the Iroquois, it was one of the "three sisters," along with beans and squash, vegetables that they grew to supplement the wild animals they hunted.
In the Andes, almost as many varieties of corn were developed as varieties of potatoes. They still have many not found in the US, such as purple corn or the very large-kerneled so-called Inca corn. The picture below is from a produce market in the Andes.
Corn is now pervasive in the American diet. You may start the day with corn flakes. If you eat store cookies or drink soft drinks or put "maple flavored" syrup on your pancakes, look at the label--the chances are excellent that you will see corn syrup used as a sweetener. (Medieval people didn't even have sugar for the most part, much less corn syrup.) Puddings, sauces, and pie fillings are thickened with corn starch. Corn bread is made of corn meal. Corn tortillas of course are made of corn, and indeed tortillas were a part of the diet of Mexico and the American southwest long before the Spaniards arrived. Corn, both the ears themselves and the stalks, are now chopped and fed to cattle. Most of our beef cattle are fed a heavily corn-based diet to fatten them up. Corn is also used to make ethanol, which is added to most gasoline. Right now fresh corn on the cob is just starting to appear in farmers' markets in the northern part of the US, but this is a tiny fraction of where corn ends up.
In the world overall, more corn is harvested by weight than any other grain. It grows fast and can be cultivated in a variety of settings if one chooses the right variety, mountains, plains, northern climes, tropical climes.... Some people now may want to reduce the amount of corn in their diet, but it's hard.
When the Spaniards reached the New World they started eating corn (unlike tomatoes, which they initially considered poisonous). However, they had serious doubts about corn flour as a substitute for wheat flour. Priests said only wheat flour could transubstantiate in the mass, meaning you couldn't use tortilla chips for the wafer, and the army leaders feared eating corn would weaken them somehow, making them more like the natives. Of course this issue was complicated by the fact that wheat is not native to the New World.
So as you munch your cornflakes, popcorn, store cookies, pudding, cola, and nacho chips, remember that medieval people would have had no idea what you were eating.
© C. Dale Brittain 2020
For more on medieval food, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages. Also available in paperback.
No comments:
Post a Comment