I had corn on the cob a few nights ago and so wanted to write an article about the history of corn, but my notes on corn are pretty paltry.  Certainly, I have a few interesting tidbits about corn, such as the fact that it was domesticated so long ago by Native Americans—somewhere between 7,500 and 12,000 years ago—and has been modified so many times since then that no modern variety can survive in the wild; corn needs to be planted by people in order to grow.

I don’t have much information about corn from other sources, so I turned to a book for today’s article: the excellent Popped Culture: A Social History of Popcorn in America, by Andrew F. Smith.

Sources on popcorn in America are pretty paltry before 1492, but Smith does some good analysis of the sources he can find.  He starts the book by talking about a few historical myths that turn out to be wrong, namely that Columbus encountered popcorn on any of his journeys, that Indians along the Atlantic coast ate popcorn before the 1500s (it arrived there because European colonists brought it up from Central and South America, not because the tradition of growing it had spread among Indians), and that popcorn was eaten at the first Thanksgiving (no surviving account mentions it and it has never been discovered by archeologists working in the area).

Eating popcorn wasn’t popular during colonization or the Revolutionary time period.  It wasn’t until the 1830s that eating it became a fad, and Smith reprints the first known published recipe for making popcorn, from the late 1840s: “Take a gill, a half-pint, or more of Valparaiso or Pop Corn, and put in a frying pan, slightly buttered, or rubbed with lard.  Hold the pan over a fire so as constantly to stir or shake the corn within, and in a few minutes each kernel will pop, or turn inside out.” (page 25)  One of the fun things about popcorn is the simplicity of making it; that 150 year old recipe works just as well today as it did back then.

Popcorn balls first appeared in America in the 1840s.  Smith notes that they were probably first made in Mexico or Guatemala, and the recipe then made its way to America, possibly as a result of the Mexican-American war of 1846-48 when thousands of Americans fought in Mexico (along with the idea of popcorn balls, returning veterans also brought chile pepper seeds with them, since the widespread growing of chiles in America dates to that time as well).  The first published recipe for popcorn balls dates from 1861, the first year of the Civil War: “Boil honey, maple, or other sugar to the great thread; pop corn and stick the corn together in balls with the candy.”

One of the most interesting aspects of the history of popcorn is its popularity in the early 20th century, when it was eaten in salads and as a breakfast cereal.  While the idea of eating popcorn in milk might sound strange, the fact is that we eat puffed rice and puffed wheat as breakfast cereals, so why not popcorn, which is essentially puffed corn?  Smith points to a couple of trends that relegated popcorn to the sidelines of American food: the growth of the movie industry, which stressed popcorn as a snack rather than an ingredient in other foods; and the popularity of ready-to-eat foods like breakfast cereals.  Cereal companies realized getting people to buy a box of popped popcorn was a tough sell so they didn’t even try and instead poured their advertising dollars into Corn Flakes, Rice Krispies, and other products you can’t make at home.  Today, popcorn is a big business, but it’s also a niche business, a shadow of what it could be.