ISSUE 84, SOUTHERN LANDRACE & HEIRLOOM CORN, Part 3: Bloody Butcher
Bloody Butcher Corn
In 2023, Bloody Butcher ranks among the most widely cultivated heirloom varieties, used both as a meal corn and a distilling resource. In the 21st century it has been selected to produce consistent 16 row purple red dented ears from middling to large size. In organic production, the corn regularly tops 60 bushels an acre in good tilth.
When first created in Kentucky and Ohio in the early 1850s, its coloration exhibited some diversity, with dull yellow and striping mingling with the lurid red. The early breeders wished it to have an intenser color and more rows than its Appalachian Red Flint parent—having the “softness” of a dent corn or a gourdseed. The name bespoke the aim: create kernels as red as butchered meat. We are fortunate in having one of 19th-century America’s great breeders of grain, J. H. Klippert, documenting the emergence of the variety in the Thirteenth Annual Report of the Ohio State Board of Agriculture (1858). By that year the variety had won a following. Klippert is informative about Bloody Butcher’s parentage, and the background of those earlier, now extinct varieties:
What is particularly interesting is that Klippert indicated that Bloody Butcher was a triple hybrid, with the pointed-kernel Hackberry, the Dent (probably Maryland Gillou rather than White Dent) and the Red Corn. The Red Corn, sometimes called Master Corn, was Red Flint that had occasional stripes on kernels. This variety found came from the Muskogee and Shawnee. It differed somewhat from the Floriani red flint that Italians secured from the West Indies during the 16th century possessing fatter, rounder kernels. It is not unusual for Bloody Butcher to recessively revent to a pointed kernel and yellower coloring as an epigenetic response to drought or excessive heat during the growing season. Yet the Bloody Butcher that breeders selected for was decidedly a dent corn. Early Southern Dents were crosses between flint corns and gourdseed varieties. One particularly desired trait, besides millability, was the tendency to set two ears per stalk, rather than the one of the Red Flint and Hackberry corns. The first prolific corn strains were southern dents. Seed selection in Bloody Butcher from 1850 to 1890 made it more prolific, supplying a second ear on the stalk, eliminating striping, and developing deeper red coloration. It still retrained a number of ‘old traits”—spacing between stalks influenced the corn’s growth habits. The more leeway between plants, the greater the vitality and productivity.
Because of its high carotene and anthocyanin levels, distillers interested in bourbons that have intrinsic corn flavor have been using bloody butcher as a still corn. Clemson University did genetic analyses of Bloody Butcher along with numbers of populations of other corns descended from the Appalachian Red Flint, including South Carolina’s Jimmy Red corn. Clemson found them distinct types.
https://npgsweb.ars-grin.gov/gringlobal/accessiondetail?id=1183300
USDA Small Grains Collection PI 2300320-