Yellow Creole Corn
Sometime in the late 1970s the last Yellow Creole Corn appeared for sale on the produce stands of Louisiana. The legendary small eared yellow flint corn had supplied the Native peoples before the French and Spanish settled, had been lye processed into hominy and ground into grits, become the signature ingredient in Cajun Cush-Cush, the favorite breakfast grits of Creole New Orleans, and the one of two kinds in “du pain mais,” Louisiana corn bread.
It was an ancient landrace, and North American adaptation of the inland tropical flint corn of the West Indies, conveyed northward sometime before the colonial era. It had all the nutrition, flavor, and beauty that one expects from a landrace maize, improved by Island Natives for hundreds of plant generations. It had one liability in the eyes of commercial farmers—it was not prolific. Stalks bore one 8 to 9 inch ear of 12, sometimes 14, rows. It was also a late season corn, taking a minimum of 120 days to mature. As early as 1911, agronomists were assuring farmers in newspaper stories that they had “found two varieties which will mean thousands of dollars to our farmers in increased yield, if they will plant this seed instead of the native, or creole corn so long used in this section.” [“Corn Sheller and Good Corn,” New Iberia Enterprise and Independent Observer (July 29, 1911), 3.] It took over a half century before the agronomists won out, and farmers fixated on generating dollars with more bushels per acre, abandoned the corn that with the culinary lynchpin of Louisiana cookery.
One cannot overstate the affection Yellow Creole Corn (maïs jaune créole) inspired in Louisiana diners. A correspondent named “Terpsichore Street” wrote a letter to the New Orleans Bulletin in 1875, observing how adamantly Louisianans preferred “the oily yellow creole corn, for the rich hominy of the breakfast table, against the white flint of Ohio and Kentucky” (August 1, 1875, p 6). Commercial processors such as George DuBlanc’s Pelican Grist Mill in Lafayette declared that their “clean, healthy Creole corn” was a “sure cure for dyspepsia and all affections of the stomach” [Ad, Lafayette Gazette (February 26, 1898), 2. One curious consequence of Yellow Creole corn’s extraordinary reputation for healthfulness was its large scale employment as chicken feed. Fowl were subject to an extraordinary range of illnesses in Louisiana, and it was thought that Creole Corn countered some of the ailments. While boiled hominy grits made of Yellow Creole Corn enjoyed a following in New Orleans and in the countryside, the fried hominy—Cush Cush, Couche Couche, Kush Kush—was decidedly a country preparation. Elisabeth Keller of Ingleside Plantation in Alexandria, and Kerry Heafner are reviving Yellow Creole Corn in Louisiana. It has been board on Slow Food’s global Ark of Taste.
Just there Saturday... what fab food!