Corn: a Savor the South cookbook

By Tema Flanagan

Without corn, Tema Flanagan writes, the South would cease to taste like the South. Her treasury of fifty-one recipes demonstrates deliciously just how important the remarkable Zea mays is to southern culture and cuisine. Corn's recipes emphasize seasonality. High summer calls for fresh corn eaten on the cob or shaved into salads, sautes, and soups. When fall and winter come, it is time to make cornmeal biscuits, muffins, cobblers, and hotcakes, along with silky spoonbread and sausage-studded cornbread stuffing. And the heaviest hitters, cornbread and grits, are mainstays all year round.

Flanagan also surveys corn's culinary history--its place in Native American culture, its traditional role on the southerner's table, and the new and exciting ways it is enjoyed in southern kitchens today. Appreciating how this oversized grass is capable of providing sustenance in an astonishing array of forms, Flanagan organizes the book to reflect corn's versatility. Sections feature corn in its full glory: fresh on and off the cob, dried and ground, nixtamalized (soaked in an alkaline solution and hulled to make hominy) and popped, and mashed and fermented. From Sweet Corn and Poblano Chowder to Southern Skillet Cornbread, from Fresh Corn Tortillas to Classic Cheese Grits, and from Molasses Caramel Corn with Candied Bacon, Peanuts, and Sesame to New Orleans Bourbon Milk Punch, the dishes range from classic southern to contemporary to globally influenced.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Feb 22, 2017
• ISBN: 9781469631639

Tema Flanagan

Tema Flanagan is a farmer at The Farm at Windy Hill, a sustainable production and teaching farm in Alabama. She cowrote, with Sara Foster, Sara Foster's Southern Kitchen.

Book preview

Introduction

On every breakfast plate in the South there always appears a little white mound of food. Sometimes it’s ignored. Sometimes insulted. But without it, the sun wouldn’t come up, the crops wouldn’t grow, and most of us would lose our drawl.

So said Bill Neal in his Good Old Grits Cookbook (1991). And he was right, though in saying it he pointed to a larger truth. The fact is, without corn—not just grits—the South would cease looking, sounding, and, most importantly, tasting like the South. The sun wouldn’t come up. The crops wouldn’t grow. And we would all most certainly lose our drawl.

Any good southerner can tell you just how important corn is to southern culture and cuisine. But corn’s siren call can be heard regardless of region, and that is especially true when it comes to corn-on-the-cob. There are few things on earth more satisfying than the crunchy, juicy sweetness of a fresh ear of corn, stripped of its silken sheath, plunged ever so briefly in boiling water, and dabbed with a little butter. As Garrison Keillor put it, People have tried and they have tried, but sex is not better than sweet corn. There’s no doubt that corn-on-the-cob is messy, delicious summertime fun.

Corn-on-the-cob may be the shining jewel on corn’s golden crown, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the remarkable Zea mays. This oversized grass is capable of providing sustenance in an astonishing array of forms: as a fresh vegetable, dried grain, ground meal, legumelike hulled hominy, oil, and alcohol (not to mention the industrial additives and sweeteners that are now also wrought from it).

Corn’s versatility is the reason we get to indulge in everything from sweet corn chowder to handsomely browned cornbread, from soft corn tortillas to luxuriously creamy grits, and from crunchy caramel corn to a good, stiff bourbon drink on the rocks. That same versatility makes corn a year-round cooking companion. High summer calls for fresh corn eaten on the cob or shaved into salads, sautés, and soups, studding them with milky-sweet kernels. When fall and winter come, it’s time to make cornmeal biscuits, muffins, cobblers, and hotcakes, along with silky spoonbread and sausage-kissed cornbread stuffing. And the heaviest hitters—cornbread and grits—are mainstays all year round. In one form or another, corn makes for good eating (and drinking) in every season, at any occasion, and at every time of day.

Corn-on-the-cob may be beloved everywhere, but when it comes to corn in its entirety—in all its many forms and fashions—I believe it must be best loved in the South. Where would southern cooking be without cornbread, grits, and hominy, for heaven’s sake? Indeed, corn has sustained southerners for generations, making southern cooking a natural and able guide to corn’s many culinary splendors. This cookbook is a testament to the place of corn in southern cooking, both throughout history and on the table today.

From Wild Grass to Maize

Corn is one of the few truly indigenous North American food crops. Not only are the genetic roots of the plant found on North American soil (in Central America, to be exact), but it was Native Americans who domesticated the plant thousands of years ago, long before European settlers made their way to the New World.

But where did corn come from, and what did it look like before it was shaped by human hands? For a long time, that remained a mystery, but we now know that corn’s genetic ancestor is a wild grass still in existence called teosinte. While the stalks and leaves are similar enough, teosinte’s grains bear little resemblance to the large, golden-kerneled cobs we know and love today. Teosinte’s seeds are much smaller and arranged in a slender stack that looks only vaguely like an ear of corn. And the grains themselves are nestled inside a rock-hard casing.

With teosinte’s grains locked up in armor, the plant would initially have had limited appeal as a grain. As Anthony Boutard reports in his book Beautiful Corn (2012), it likely first captured the attention of the hunter-gatherers of Central America not for the seeds but for the sugar that ran through its veins. Like sugarcane and sorghum, teosinte’s stalks could be chewed to release a sweet nectar. While tasty, the sugars in the grass were nowhere near nutritious enough to bear the weight of a civilization’s growth. So it wasn’t until the grains were unlocked that corn became the life-sustaining staple it remains today.

In that regard, corn’s early domesticators likely had a little help. It is thought that the domestication process started with a genetic mistake: a mutation that caused teosinte to produce naked kernels, without the hard shell. Early Native American farmers slowly isolated and bred the plants with naked kernels and other desirable traits. After hundreds—if not thousands—of years, the result was an entirely new creation: maize (from the Arawak mahiz).

Starting in present-day Central America, indigenous peoples brought maize (in breathtakingly diverse variety) with them as they migrated north, into the borders of what is now the United States. So diverse was the plant at this time that it was capable of growing in just about any climate and altitude. On the east coast of the United States, where European settlers would eventually make landfall, hard-kerneled, flint-type corn predominated in the north, while softer, starchier, dent-type corn made its home in the South (more on that later).

If corn is important to southerners, it was absolutely vital to early indigenous cultures. Along with maize, early indigenous peoples domesticated beans and squash. These three sisters crops formed the backbone of indigenous cuisine.

We can also thank these early corn adopters for hominy: it was they who learned to treat the corn kernels by boiling them in water mixed with wood ash or slaked lime in a process called nixtamalization. The kernels were boiled until the hulls came off, which made for easier grinding (a very important consideration when one is grinding meal by hand). Incidentally, this process also made the niacin housed in the corn nutritionally available.

Without iron tools or draft animals, indigenous peoples raised and processed corn using hand tools of wood and stone. While they enjoyed fresh corn in many forms—raw, boiled, and roasted, as well as cut off the cob in dishes like succotash (from the Narragansett sohquttahhash)—the majority was picked for grain and had to be dried and processed. For those southerly groups that raised softer dent corn, the grinding stone, or metate, was an indispensable tool. Women ground the kernels by hand using a rounded stone that fit in the palm of the hand, often singing special milling songs in rhythm with their rigorous work. Where harder flint varieties were grown, grinding wasn’t sufficient to break up the kernels. For those steely kernels, only pounding would do. For flint corn growers, the answer was a very large wooden mortar and pestle, sometimes called a hominy block.

But for these cultures, corn wasn’t just about food. As much as nutrition, corn offered mythological and spiritual sustenance. In many ways, corn (and the mythology surrounding it) explained the world—explained life itself—and answered all the metaphysical questions to which it gave rise. For the indigenous people of the corn throughout the Americas, corn was origin story, goddess, mother.

From Maize to Corn

So it was with an astonishing lack of reverence that most European settlers in the South greeted the sacred grain of their new home. The Europeans came with a taste for the wheat flour of their motherland. Much to their chagrin, however, wheat stubbornly refused to perform well in the warm, wet climate of the Southeast. The settlers met Indian corn and the flour it made with resistance, making bread with it by necessity rather than preference.

The settlers complained that corn flour was too labor-intensive to grind. They complained that the bread it made was too heavy. And they complained that it stubbornly refused to rise under yeast’s spell, as wheat flour did. In fact, food historian Betty Fussell in her book The Story of Corn (1992) reports that one early settler even went so far as to call cornbread batter a sad paste of despair. Meanwhile, as the settlers complained, the corn they so bitterly resented was busy keeping them alive. Without corn, it is safe to say, the experience of the European settlement of North America would have been quite different—and perhaps unsuccessful.

While the native term for corn was maize, European settlers called the grain Indian corn. At that time, the word corn simply meant grain and could refer to anything from wheat and rye to barley and oats. Over time, the word corn came to mean Zea mays in particular. Ironically, both maize and Indian corn are now typically used to describe the decorative, multicolored cobs that are used in wreaths and table displays from Halloween to Thanksgiving.

Corn and Southern Foodways

Regardless of how well they liked it at the outset, southern settlers and their descendants would continue to eat corn, and plenty of it, for generations to come. For poor southerners, especially, corn was a dietary mainstay, forming one of the three m’s that made up the core of their cookery: meat