[Sca-cooks] corn

[Decker, Terry D.]

More correctly, maize, as "corn" is a generic term for common cereals.

There is a plate in Leonard Fuch's Herbal of 1545 which shows Turkish Corn,
so maize was a widely enough known to appear in an early 16th Century German
herbal.  The transfer is probably from Spain to Venice to Turkey and back
into Central Europe as a good piece of Eastern Europe was under Turkish rule
at the time, suggesting there might have been a rapid adoption.  Fuchs, btw,
comments that it makes fine white meal from which bread is baked ("Man macht
aber auß disem korn über die massen schön weiß meel/ vnd becht darnach brodt
darauß/ das macht leichtlich verstopffung").

Proving where and when it was grown is exceptionally illusive.  The
commentary from the Greenpeace archive is based on academic speculation and
I think the source for these "facts" is Food: A Culinary History, but I
would have to check.  We don't necessarily know whether it was originally
grown to feed animals, humans, or both.  It did enter the peasant diet and
it is at present primarily used as the replacement for barley in polenta.

Maize is referred to as "millet" in the Diario of Christopher Columbus.  And
Peter Martyr ("De orbe nouo, 1530) provides, "Maizium granum ex quo
conficitur panis" ("Corn/maize grains from which bread is made"), but he was
referring to its use in the New World.

"Fa la farina bianca, della quale si fa bel pane, la sostanza del quale è
più grossa, & pi` viscosa del nostro. ... Fanno di questa farina i contadini
le polente, & le torte aggiuntoui butiro, & formaggio, & è cibo non insuaue:
ma genera grosso nudrimento," a quote from Castor Durante's Italian Herbal
of 1585 tells us maize was used in bread, polenta and torts, but there are
no recipes.

A number of these quotes were provided by Thomas Gloning, and some, but not
all, have made it into the Florilegium, where the information on maize is
divided between vegetables and bread.

The idea that maize became became the staple of the 18th Century
Mediterranean peasant diet is apparently based on the accounts of pellegra
outbreaks in the 18th.  Since pellegra was first identified in 1735, this
sudden increase may be due to various researchers reporting on conditions
which had been previously described as something else.  I suspect that
linking maize to pellegra led to it being used mostly as animal fodder in
Europe.

Bear

> This has probably been talked about before, but I didn't see
> anything in an
> admittedly hasty skim of the florilegium...please don't flame
> me for asking.
>
> I noticed something in Arcimboldo's painting "Summer" here's
> a link to a
> good scan:
> http://www.abcgallery.com/A/arcimboldo/arcimboldo2.html
> In place of the ear...is that corn?
>
> On a quick web search, I also found this
> http://archive.greenpeace.org/~geneng/reports/gmo/gmo017.htm
> Maize cultivation in Europe started at the beginning of the
> 16th century in
> southern Spain, followed in the 1530s by Portugal, France, and Italy
> (Venetia). By 1563, maize was familiar enough around southern
> Europe to
> appear in the painting 'Summer' by Archimbaldo. Maize rarely
> replaced other
> grain crops - rather, it was cultivated on fallow land or in farmers'
> gardens. In its first decades in Europe, maize was neglected by the
> landowners and was not a commercial crop. In those times, the farmers'
> gardens were the 'private areas' where the peasants grew
> their subsistence
> products with no tax or tribute to pay. It took several decades before
> landowners in some regions like north-east Italy realised the economic
> potential of maize. In the 18th century, maize (polenta) became
> increasingly the staple - sometimes only - food source of the
> poor in the
> Mediterranean regions.
>
> Can anyone confirm or deny? If corn was known in period, how
> was it used
> and are there any recipes?
>
> Giles