ISSUE 37, TASTES, Part 4: How Sweet it Is! Corn Beyond the Bliss Point
Delivered at the Southern Foodways Alliance Symposium 2016
How Sweet it is!
There is a young man who is a sophomore in the ag program at Austin Peay University in Clarksburg TN. His name is Stephen Smith. He is from Guthrie KY, a short drive from Clarksburg. At his home, he grows out numbers of the maize landraces from central and South America—the oldest and most ancient strains of corn that have survived. He includes a few early Cherokee maize varieties in the mix. He is a descendent of He keeps pure lines of each—because the old landraces are the results of thousands of plant generations of breeding by over sixty human generations of Native cultivators. They are the masterworks of natural history by various peoples—the summation of their knowledge of growing things and their own need for nutrition.
He also takes certain of these maize varieties, crossing them, trying to create corn that is best suited to that area North of Nashville and West of Bowling Green on the Kentucky, Tennessee border. It’s an interesting idea. Unleash the genetic diversity of the old landraces by mashing them up. Those crosses that are suited to the terroir, flourish, those that aren’t suited, fail. You do this on a large enough scale with enough landraces and you will variety precisely calibrated to your locale possessing many of the durable virtues passed in these corn through the generations—drought resistance, vigor, quickness of maturation, millability.
I think of Stephen Smith as the anti-Syngenta. What that international agri-chemical business attempts to construction a universal use corn, adaptable to the widest range of climatic conditions around the globe, provided the same chemical soil supplementations (also provided by the seed company) are used—in short, corn without place, uninflected by terroir—Smith is trying to surf the genetic diversity and genetic adaptability of the most ancient corn varieties to get the corn EXACLTY suited to his southern place.
I like it. Except for one thing. The taste problem. While things like productivity, water tolerance, plant stature, cob morphology, kernel shape and color, can be tweaked by crosses rather quickly, taste was something dialed in carefully over many generations.
Taste in all animals, indicates what in the environment is edible—more than edible--nutritious. Plant breeding before the modern age was seed selection always favoring seed from the plant that tasted best. Grains that over the centuries became landraces became benchmarks in a quest for wholesomeness.
There is nothing sensational about wholesomeness. It is a quality that is moderate, nuanced—so a wholesome grain can be consumed day after day. Think about Chullpi, one of the three ancestors of all sweet corns. This Ark of Taste roasting maize from Peru and Argentina contains, when young, dextrin in some quantity, and gets starchier when mature. It is a modestly sweet corn. Chullpi resulted from a natural mutation (geneticists call it Su1) in which sugars were not wholly converted to starches during the corn’s development; the cap was wrinkled; when dry the kernels tend to translucence. The Kolla people discovered and nurtured it. This mutation occurred in several maiz families creating three distinct lines of sweet corn: the others of the Maiz Dulce of Mexico, and the Papoon Corn of North America, a mutation that may have occurred as late as the 2nd half of the eighteen centuries. But this last corn when taken up by Americans became a kind of launch pad of experimentation for ever greater sweetness. From Old Colony Sweet, to Nowell’s Evergreen, to Silver Queen, to How Sweet it Is. Two centuries of ramping up the the brix-the sacharinne content in corn—until it has blasted past the bliss point—the experiential threshold in taste where anything more degrades the experience of sweetness.
And the quest for more intense sensation is not limited to the sweet spectrum. Scovill mania has infected pepper breeders, so that creations such as the Carolina Reeper and the Moruga Scorpion offer a vulcanism above 2,000,000 units.
A recent book, Mark Schatzker’s The Dorito Effect, documents the explosion in the use of spice over the last century in American mass market food.
And the simple cup of joe has ramped up to a six pack of red bull.
What happened to derail the cultivation of wholesome and nutrition for extreme tastes. The short answer is drugs happened. And it happened with the opening up of of world exploration and colonization in the 16th century. Wolfgang Shivelbush in a book written a generation called the tastes of paradise argued that the first world trade system set was a drug trade—and its commodities—sugar, coffee, tobacco, alcohol, tea, chocolate, hot peppers, spice—had the hallmarks of drugs—altering one’s bodily function—inducing a craving for more—not being nutritive in themselves. The drug component mattered as much as flavor—caffeine, theobromine, capsicum. Indeed the heat of capsicum was not registered by any taste bud at all, but the body’s pain sensing mechanisms. Once people began ingesting the tastes of paradise they wanted more and more and more.
Sweet Corn first became known to Anglo-Americans in 1779 as a spoil of war. Revolutionary General John Sullivan invaded the Six Iriquois Nations, because they were allies of the British, Lt. Richard Bagnal of Poor’s Brigade collected several ears maize when the patrol overran a Native encampment. An Iroquois called it Papoon corn because it was fed to children because it was soft and sweet. [Old Colony Memorial. Rept Middlesex Gazette] To the sugar loving New Englanders, sweet was good, and almost immediately it spread into general cultivation under the names Old Colony or sweet corn. American farmers began improving the corn immediately. It had in its earliest form a red cob that when boiled would stain linen. By 1800 the cob had been drained of color. They selected seed for more sweetness and less starch.
I reckon I’ts an enduring human trait to insist what one likes is good for one, particularly if it is addictive. So the elaboration of saccharine as a positive good began early—and at the time of Lt. Bagnal’s snatching of sugar corn from the Iroquois, chemists in Europe were attempting to extract sugar from the stalks of common strains of Indian Corn. Jacquin of Vienne in the erly 1780s, Francesco Marabelli in Italy in the 1790s, and finally Henry Hermstaedt in London who determined that granulated sugar was too expense to create, even with catalysts, but corn syrup might be extracted relatively inexpensively from corn stalks of almost any variety. That as 1811. But it Americans for almost a century preferred to get saccharine from corn by roasting or boiling sweet corn. And they comforted themselves on the nutritional wisdom of their pursuit by observing how greedily cows and hogs went after sweet corn as feed.
Old Colony found many growers in the South, who designated it a garden corn, rather than a field variety. But there was an enduring form of discontent with it. After you picked it the quality of the sweetness faded quickly. You had to get it in the pot quickly to capture the sweet. Because it did not transport as cobs, it was processed by the kernels being cut from the cobs into boiling water, parboiled, extracted and dried on screens. The dried kernels could keep and be transported Later they would be reconstituted in hot water.
Still . . . if you could get a sweet corn that did not go starchy in a few hours after being picked, or one that could be keep its sugary quality on the stalk for a time without drying out . . .
In 1848 Nathan Stowell of Burlington NJ hit upon a solution: cross Old Colony with Menomy soft corn—you’d get a 7 foot stalk bearing two ears with 9 inch cobs bearing 16 to 20 rows of longish kernels that could retain its ‘green corn taste’ in the field or in the kitchen longer than any sweet corn. For this reason it was named Stowell’s Evergreen sweet corn, and it remained the dominant sweet corn in the United States from 1850 to 1958 when supplanted by Silver Queen. ; to this days it has admirers, who like the moderated sugariness of the corn over the more candy like corn that came after 1956.
It had two rivals—in northern states Shaker sweet corn—an improved form of Old Colony. In the South Country Gentleman shoepeg corn, a cross between the old gourdseed varieties and sweet corn that preserved the random kernel arrangments on the cobs that trace back to the Mexican Pepita landrace of pre-settler antiquity. Shoepeg had small kernels, intensely white, and was favored for making corn puddings and creamed corn.
Born Stowell’s Evergreen and Country Gentlemen would be eclipsed in 1950s. That was a pivotal date for sweetness in the United States. In 1951 the last of the Kellogg brothers, the cereal purists died, at age 96. His offspring immediately slathered sugar on the classic corn flakes,” and hooked the baby boomers on their sugar crack by having an animated tiger shout “They’re great” on the first TVs in American homes.
In 1958 the Rhode Brothers of Idaho Falls introduced Silver Queen. It had three great virtues: its sugary taste, its resistance to disease, and its size. Though it was a late season corn, it single handedly revived the public esteem for white sweet corn and became so strong a seller at the produce stand, the grocery, and the processors. It presented a beautiful ear in a tightly wrapped husk. burnt itself into the imaginations of Vietnam-era Americans and remains lodged today as a resonant name. No yellow sweet corn could break its hold on the hearts of consumers—not Golden Cross Bantam. Indeed the painted sign board beside a produce stand reading SILVER QUEEN was one of the iconic images of summer. And it became so strong an association that many a later white sweet corn variety—particularly the sugary extender varieites—Spring Snow, Sugar Pea, Silver King and Argent is sold to this day as Silver Queen, even though it is not.
The last quarter of the century might be called the sugar jag era of corn breeding. Two paths were taken toward greater dulcetness: the sugar extender path (called Se by agriculturists) and the supersweet (Sh2). I suppose the person most responsible for blazing the path toward more saccharine was John Laughnan, a breeder at the University of Illinois, who id’d the gene that governed the production of sugar instead of starch in sweet corn. Using traditional breeding techniques he came up with the first supersweet in 1961 a short three years after Silver Queen was launched. Despite its possessing 4 times the sugar and lasting sweet for a week after picking, the variety never developed a huge following: the skins of the kernels were too tough. They stuck in your teeth.
In the 1980s Laughnan’s colleague at Illinois, Dusty Rhodes, tweaked the genetics to create a more tender supersweet. The people who drove the adoption of the corn were the produce managers of chain grocery stores who thought the corn’s ability to keep its sugar level elevated for 10 days a boon. Grocery stores could keep the corn in the bins for a week. Depending on the supersweet variety the corn ranged from 4 to 10 times that of sweet corn. As a category they present a problem culinarily. Traditional dishes using sweet corn were calibrated for much less sweet varieties—whether puddings, creamed corn, stews, or fritters. So the supersweets are best employed as a standalone, or in new dishes. Now there is a type of southerner suckled on sweat tea who will find this path toward sugar maximization congenial. If this is you than I have a supersweet variety I’ll suggest to you: How sweet it is—and also a dish—sweet corn ice cream.
But if you are a person with trepidation about type two diabetes, weight gain, joint inflammation, and tooth decay—in other words—the type of person who goes for the unsweetened ice tea, you might find Country Gentleman the best recourse.
Here with confront the paradox of southern taste: Just as the South leads the nation in sales of both sweet and unsweet ice tea, it is the place that grows the most old style shoepeg and Evergreen corn, while growing and consuming the Supersweets as well. For hedonistic pursuit of sensation, or the retention of traditional wholesomeness, the South stands forward. I could make some gesture at the diversity of peoples and cultures and this point—but I think there is an old consumption contradiction at work.
But the crazed pursuit of sensation kicks in only when the tastes of paradise come into play. It isn’t as though the pursuit of wholesomeness has been abandoned when other foods are in play. Think of meal corn. In about 1880 the landrace eight row white dent corn that the Natives in the Appalachian mountains grew for centuries was bred by A. O. Lee of Bartee Virginia into enormous size with great starch quality and density. He named it after a nearby rail stop, Hickory junction, calling the corn Hickory King. Its tight husk inhibited insect depredation. Almost instantly farmers in the South realized that a kind of perfection had been achieved. It has remained in wide cultivation since that day, used by distillers, millers, snack makers (corn nuts), and most recently Hispanic southerners who have recognized it as an ideal corn for nixtamalization—for posole or what was traditionally called hereabouts hominy. But the quality of the corn was such that it had a global life, spreading to South America, Africa, Europe. Indeed in Africa today, it is the sole heirloom corn variety, grown in commercial scale cultivation.
Sometimes cultivators create things whose taste is so satisfying in needs no further improvement. Thing of the cabernet sauvignon grape that has been clone now for over two centuries. It is more difficult to stabilize attributes and taste in sexually propagated crops, but with Hickory King assiduous care has kept the King on his throne for 136 years. All hail the King, the Hickory King of wholesomeness.