Corn varieties

[zimmerstutzen]

Read the thread about corn on the cob and was eating some over the weekend with my brother and he remarked that the "sweet" corn hybrids raised today are very sugary compared to the corn flavored varieties we ate as kids. It struck me that whether corn on the cob was HC, I wondered what the historic varieties really tasted like. Has anyone actually had any true centuries old variety sweet corn to know?

I know some varieties are regionally more popular now and probably were then as well. For instance, on the Delmarva Peninsula silver queen still reigns supreme as the favorite variety, yet around here, folks favor the newer mixed white and yellow varieties. I can't remember the name of the favorite back in the 50's in eastern PA but I remember it was the only thing anyone grew. A medium yellow very corn flavored item.

 

[coloradoclyde]

In the last 100 years or so not only have corn varietals changed....but so has the soil, the climate, and our palates....
We are so bombarded with sugar on a daily basis that anything less than a pound of sugar seems bitter to most people...
A persons perception of sweet back then was not the same as today....
Almost everything we eat has been made to be more sweet than it was 100 years ago...
The true challenge is finding something that hasn't been tampered with either by genetic manipulation or natural selection....

 

[Kansas Jake]

There are organizations that try to maintain heritage varieties of all kinds of vegetables etc. I grew up eating a lot of field corn on the cob years ago. We also raised some "indian" corn back in the 50's. The flavor was similar to field corn.

Corn in the early 50's was already hybrid and now most corn grown in this country is genetically modified to control root worms and ear worms. That is one of the reasons you rarely see sweet corn in the grocery store with damage to the ear from worms. It was a big problem 20 years ago.

 

[zimmerstutzen]

Found an article on-line about varieties of sweet corn. The one every one grew in eastern PA was Golden Bantam cross. According to the article introduced in 1933. The Early Bantam cross was introduced on 1902. Many of the sweet corn varieties grown and sold today have 4 to ten times the sugars, that Golden Bantam cross has.

 

[larryp]

I raise Painted Mountain corn which is descended from different Mandan strains of corn. Some we let mature and dry to grind into corn meal and some we pick in the milk stage and eat as corn on the cob. It's not as sweet as modern sweet corn but it's still tasty with some butter and salt even though technically it's a flour corn. Still it's very similar to what colonial settlers and different native tribes would have eaten.

These ears were picked in the milk stage and don't have as much color as what they get when mature.
Makes a tasty corn bread too with lots of different colored specks in it.

 

[George]

Cool. You might be interested in this site:
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/buffalo/garden/garden.html

It is an excellent description of the agriculture practices of the Hidatsa, close neighbors of the Mandan, with very good coverage of corn, all the types, uses, growing, harvesting and preserving. One of my favorite books.

Spence

 

[larryp]

Thanks for the link! I'd started reading it once over a year ago and lost track of the site when my old computer crashed.