My father loved thee through his length of days;
For thee his fields were shaded o’er with maize;
From thee what health, what vigor he possessed,
Ten sturdy freemen from his loins attest;
Thy constellation ruled my natal morn,
And all my bones were made of Indian corn.
Delicious grain! whatever form it take,
To roast or boil, to smother or to bake,
In every dish ’tis welcome still to me,
But most, my Hasty Pudding, most in thee.
—from “The Hasty Pudding,” by Joel Barlow, 1793
While tons of corn were being shipped to the big cities, a lot of it never left the farm. Much of what stayed behind went to feed farm animals, which will be discussed in the next chapter, but a lot of it was also destined for the tables of the people who grew it. Corn appeared at almost every meal, and in some instances, it was the meal.
Part of this culinary dependence was because of the abundance of corn, but more was because of the relative ease of harvesting and preparing corn, at least on the scale of family need, rather than commercial use. Unlike other cereal grains, corn can be enjoyed green straight from the plant, with cooking almost optional. It can be ground and turned into the hasty pudding, aka cornmeal mush, celebrated in the poem above. Equally important, unlike wheat or other small grains, corn could easily be harvested by women and children: just walk into the field and snap off an ear of corn. It was one of the reasons that families could still have a corn crop even when the men were off to sea, out hunting, or away exploring. While it was more difficult to develop machines that could harvest corn, in premachine days it was much easier to harvest corn than the small grains.1
Corn offered a degree of independence to farmers that other grains did not—because, although it was nice if one had a gristmill nearby, mills weren’t always accessible on the frontier. And with corn, it wasn’t really necessary to have a mill to produce as much cornmeal as a family might need. So farmers and their families could get by without anyone else to help transform the corn into food. More processing was possible, and more developed in time, but eating corn really didn’t require much technology—just a bit of elbow grease. This creation of independence is one of the things that made corn ideal for opening up the frontier.2 (That, and the fact that a few seeds produced a lot more food than the same number of seeds for any other grain.)
However, though very primitive technologies would get the job done, why not make things easier? That soon began to happen in the realm of putting dinner on the table.
While harvesting enough corn for family consumption was easy, the next steps involved a fair bit of work. Shelling the dried corn—cutting the kernels off the cob—was not complicated, but neither was it easy. Like the Native Americans from whom they learned corn culture, early settlers just shelled what they needed, as they needed it. Shelling “tools” included rubbing one ear of dry corn against another, scraping the corn against the edge of a shovel, pounding the corn with clubs, or driving animals over it. Using the side of a bayonet proved a bit more effective than some of these methods. However, by the time people were spreading across the Midwest, new gadgets made shelling corn relatively easy. In the 1820s, shellers were devised that, while refined over the years, remained the most efficient and reliable option available for the next century.
With some variations, the basic design of these shellers was a mouth or chute for feeding ears of corn to an iron-toothed wheel that turned as the operator turned the hand crank. The iron teeth tore the grains off the cob, depositing corn kernels in a bucket and depositing a stripped corncob nearby. By the mid-1800s, most farms had one of these devices. The speed with which the shellers were adopted speaks to the difficulty of getting by without them.3
The bonus was that the corncobs would be in better condition than if they were pounded with clubs or stomped by livestock—because corncobs were useful. A large basket of corncobs could be found near the kitchen door of most homes, to be used as kindling for the wood-burning stove or to scrub pots and pans after the cooking was done.4 One could make corncob jelly out of nice, clean cobs. Cobs could also be turned into corncob pipes.
FIGURE 12. Hand-cranked corn shellers made shelling corn a lot easier. Shellers like this could be found on most farms by the mid-1800s. Photo courtesy of John Deere Company.
Once off the ear, corn kernels were not dramatically different from other grains, from the standpoint of processing. The first settlers combined what they knew about handling Old World grains with techniques learned from Native Americans. Baby corn and green corn could be enjoyed before the plants were mature, but once the corn had fully ripened and began to dry, all one really needed was a fire to heat it until it cracked open, or rocks to pound it into powder. The heated corn was known as parched corn, and it was ready to eat once it cooled off. The pounded corn was a bit more versatile. To that basic ingredient, simply add water and heat to create some of the iconic corn dishes of history: cornpone, johnnycakes,5 and hoe cakes. Add a little fat, some milk, molasses, eggs—and the menu grew.
Some folks did a little more than just pound the corn. The Pilgrims learned from Native Americans how to make hominy, a lye-treated form of corn that improves the nutritional profile and shelf life of the grain.6 (The word hominy comes from the Algonquian word homen, which refers to something being treated.)7 This lye treating is essentially the same as Mexico’s nixtamalization, except the latter more commonly uses slaked lime, rather than lye.8 Nixtamalization removes the pericarp (hull) and swells the starch. It also dissolves the cell walls of the germ, so the corn is no longer viable as a seed. For hominy, both pericarp and germ are removed.9 It is because of this destruction or removal of the germ that processed corn lasts longer: the germ is where the oil is found, and it goes rancid quickly if unrefrigerated. While early settlers had no idea they were improving the nutrition of the corn, they appreciated that this processed corn stayed fresh longer and was easier to grind.
Both hominy and untreated whole-grain corn became indispensable in colonial and pioneer diets—though rarely if ever in their whole form. Dried whole-grain corn could be ground to produce coarse, medium, or fine cornmeal or, finer still, corn flour. Because it still had the germ and pericarp, cornmeal had more fiber and was a whole grain, but it couldn’t be stored as long. Fortunately, because corn was normally ground in the autumn or later, winter assisted with preservation before refrigerators came along.
Hominy, if merely broken up, was called samp, from the Narragansett word nasàump, which referred to corn mush. If it was ground finer, it became hominy grits, or simply grits10 (possibly from an English word that referred to coarse meal11). Both the techniques and the terms were carried west and north as people migrated to the region that would become the Midwest.
Armed with cornmeal, samp, and grits, in addition to the delights of green or sweet corn, the homemakers of the growing United States set about creating an extensive repertoire of corn-based recipes, most of them delightful. In fact, iconic regional favorites, from grits to cornbread to corn chowder, are still part of the modern culinary scene.
Mills were grinding corn and hominy on the East Coast long before pioneers headed west, but how did settlers create samp, grits, and cornmeal on the frontier in the 1800s before mills arrived? A tremendous amount of ingenuity was brought to bear on the problem, and a number of solutions emerged. It’s hard to know what was devised first, where, and by whom, but a few approaches became widespread. For corn that was still fairly soft, there was the tin gritter. This was a strip of metal with holes punched in it to create a grating surface. However, dried corn was a bit more resistant to alteration. Indian grinding stones or mortars and pestles were the simplest devices and were relatively easy to carry along on the trail.
In areas with abundant trees, the most common approach was the hominy block, also known as a samp mill. This was essentially a large, tree- and gravity-assisted mortar and pestle. First, a nice, strong, springy tree limb on a fairly tall tree was needed. From this, a large, heavy section of tree trunk was suspended, with handles attached on either side. This would be the pestle. Just beneath the pestle, a substantial section of tree trunk was positioned, with its top hollowed out to hold the corn. The operator would grab the two handles and pull the pestle downward into the corn. The springiness of the branch would lift it up again. It would be possible to get a nice rhythm going, reducing dried corn or hominy to meal or grits with considerable efficiency.
For all-weather grinding, the hominy block could be moved indoors. Simply cut off the springy tree limb and anchor it under the roof of the cabin or barn. So important were hominy blocks to “food processing” that finding a good tree became a major consideration when deciding where to settle.
As time passed and more supplies were reaching the frontier, querns became more popular. Querns are hand mills that date back to the Roman Empire. They were not originally taken along by settlers, because they are heavy, and weight was an issue when traveling by horse or wagon. The quern has a stationary bottom stone and a rotating upper stone. The upper stone has a handle slightly off-center and a hole right in the center. Corn is poured in the center hole while the stone is turned, and the corn grinds between the two stones. This was in essence a miniature version of what would happen in a gristmill—and it was a big improvement over the mortar and pestle.12
As larger millstones became available, larger mills were added to farms—first larger querns, and then mills where animals were needed to turn the top stone. Finally, someone with the capital to buy and transport really large stones, and to build the millhouse and the waterwheel to power the millstones, would move into an area where there was a nice river but no mill and would begin to attract farmers who wanted their grain milled. These are the classic structures that the word mill usually conjures up in people’s minds, with their great waterwheels and picturesque settings. Along with a school and a church, a gristmill was considered one of the three cornerstones of civilization. Big cities had mills. Once an area had a mill, there was the promise of a town.
FIGURE 13. Before commercial mills were available on the frontier, querns, like this one, made grinding corn much easier than it had been with mortars and hominy blocks. Corn is poured into the center as the heavy top stone is turned by hand. Photo by Cynthia Clampitt, taken at Graue Mill and Museum, Oak Brook, IL, used with their permission.
Harvest was in the fall, and then corn needed time to dry. As a result, grinding didn’t usually start until nearly December, not ending until April. Fortunately, the power generated by the waterwheel could operate a sawmill and other equipment during the nongrinding months. But during the winter, it was consumed with grinding. Farmers rarely had money, so they paid in grain, and then the miller could sell the grain (usually as meal or flour) to obtain his profit.13
The importance of milling has continued to grow as the population has grown. Today, most corn is ground in factories that use electricity or combustion engines for power, rather than waterwheels, and giant steel rollers, instead of stones, to do the grinding. Modern milling turns out cornmeal and corn flour that are finer and more consistent than those produced by stone grinding. The fineness of the cornmeal means it cooks more quickly, and the speed and scale of operation lowers the prices. It offers a smoother, less grainy product. However, the higher temperatures of steel rollers seem to rob the corn of some of its character. Those who value texture and taste, as well as nutrition, still tend to prefer the stone-ground meals. They take longer to cook, but they taste more like corn. Fortunately, both are available now: steel-ground and stone-ground. There are still a lot of millers running traditional gristmills, producing stone-ground cornmeal, so the taste and textures that led Americans to fall in love with corn can still be enjoyed.
Corndodgers and cornmeal mush were the basis of most meals for the earliest settlers in the Midwest. As things improved, a family might indulge in some variation on this menu on Sundays, enjoying preserves and biscuits instead of corndodgers.14 But it was not until areas became a bit more settled that food became less austere. Gardens were grown, once a good crop assured survival and a house was built (usually, planting crops came first, the house, second, with settlers sleeping in tents or wagons until the first crop was in the ground and growing). Then, in time, towns and mills appeared.
Grinding and cooking improved somewhat in tandem. Gristmills offered more consistent and finer grinding than a hominy block, and the finer results offered the home cook the option of producing more refined foods. But a bigger reason for improvements in the culinary output of rural kitchens was a combination of faster transportation, which made more ingredients available, and the invention of the kitchen stove.
The first cast-iron kitchen stove was invented around 1800. Called the Rumford stove, for its inventor, Count Rumford, this monster, ideal for restaurants or palaces, was too big for a private home. In 1834, Philo Penfield Stewart of Oberlin College in Ohio took out a patent for a new stove. This one was still cast-iron, but smaller and more affordable. The fact that 102 new cooking stoves received patents over the next five years suggests just how ready people were to stop cooking over roaring fires in open fireplaces (the primary reason—the serious danger of open-hearth cooking—being compounded by the fact that wood for those fireplaces was increasingly costly and difficult to come by, especially on the treeless plains of the Midwest). Foundries for manufacturing cast-iron stoves began to multiply, first in larger cities, such as Albany, Cincinnati, and St. Louis, and then in smaller towns, such as Bloomington, Illinois, which had two stove companies by 1887.
FIGURE 14. The cast-iron wood-burning stove had a dramatic effect on the types of food and number of dishes prepared for family meals. A heavy metal plate under the stove reduced the risk of setting the house on fire. Home Comfort stoves, like this one, were manufactured in St. Louis, Missouri. Photo by Cynthia Clampitt, taken at Kline Creek Living History Farm, West Chicago, IL, used with their permission.
Stoves still burned wood, but they burned much less, and they could be started, and sometimes fueled, with readily available materials—such as dried corncobs. In addition to saving fuel, the stoves made it possible to have several pots on top as well as something in the oven. And there’s the rub. The person responsible for meals (usually the woman of the house) was expected to take advantage of all the options offered by the stove. The ads in the magazines promised effortless cooking, but they didn’t mention additional work. No more one-pot meals. Cornmeal mush still simmered on the back of the stove for breakfast, but there should also be fresh-baked cornbread, fried potatoes, and meat of some sort.15 Dinners were expected to be even more complex. Some complained that roasted meats weren’t as good as they had been when turned on a spit over an open fire—and that was probably true—but stoves were safer than open fires, and they offered more possibilities.
Corn remained a ubiquitous ingredient, with cornmeal mush still the most common breakfast and cornbread of some sort at every other meal. However, as more Europeans arrived, new ideas, cooking methods, and foods were introduced into the mix. Mothers still handed down family recipes to daughters, but a lot of experimentation occurred, as well, especially with so many newcomers trying to balance between clinging to tradition and adapting to the ingredients available in the United States.
There was an explosion of cookbooks during the 1860s, though the advent of the kitchen stove was not the only, or even the primary, reason. The Civil War kicked off the cookbook revolution, with the recipe collections being put out by church groups, clubs, or ladies’ aid societies trying to raise money to buy bandages and supplies for soldiers. The recipe collections consisted of anything contributed by the women in the group producing the cookbook. There were usually several different recipes for each of the most common dishes of the day. Measurements had not been standardized yet (standard measures weren’t introduced until Fannie Farmer published her best-selling Boston Cooking School Cookbook in 1896), and a great deal of prior knowledge and experience was simply assumed, so these cookbooks are not easily used today. The hand-written notes added to some of these books by their owners offer a glimpse into what cooking was like at the time, and which dishes were most popular. Once the Civil War ended, women’s groups continued to create cookbooks, because they had proven themselves as effective fundraisers—but cookbooks had also become popular.16
While the recipes might not meet modern expectations, they did make it clear that rural cooks were nothing if they were not ambitious. Cakes, soufflés, pies, casseroles, puddings, and pan-fried delicacies filled the pages, as women shared with each other everything they knew how to prepare or, in some cases, had learned back east before coming to the frontier. The number and variety of vegetable and fruit dishes testified to the abundance of the gardens on most farms. As trains spread westward from the East Coast into the Heartland, an increasing amount of exotica appeared on their pages, too, from curries to oysters.
Cookbooks also helped home cooks figure out how to preserve foods and how to utilize preserved foods once it came time to use them in meals—because cooking was only one of the tasks that had to be done in the kitchen.
Survival is possible only as long as there is food. In places that have winter, survival meant not only producing enough to eat, but also finding ways to store or preserve enough to eat once the snows came. Plus, on a farm that meant enough food for all the livestock, as well as the family. Cold weather helped with preservation, but it also meant months without being able to grow anything. Pretty much everything a pioneer family was able to store would be gone by spring—and until new crops were planted and began to grow, spring could be a mighty hungry time for farm families. So across the Midwest, where winters could be long and brutal, preserving food was a priority.
Dried corn could spend the winter out in the corncrib. Cornmeal could be kept for several months if it was kept cool. Hominy would last almost indefinitely. But what if sweet corn was wanted in the winter? Boiling, drying, pickling, canning, or any of several other options might do the trick. A few “recipes” from cookbooks that came out in the 1800s suggest the level of effort involved both in preserving the corn and in resuscitating it. The first two are from “76”: A Cook Book, a collection published in 1876 by the Ladies of Plymouth Church in Des Moines, Iowa.
Cut the corn from the cob, and put down in an earthen jar, with every sixth measure, salt; measure with a pint cup. When the jar is full, let the first covering be of the inside leaves of the husk put down on the corn. For cooking, have a large kettle full of boiling water; squeeze the brine from the corn, and put it in the boiling water without washing; let it boil until the water is quite salt; have a tea-kettle of boiling water ready to put on the corn as soon as the salt water is poured off; change the water until the corn is sufficiently freshened. Season with butter, cream and a little sugar and pepper.
Parboil it, cut it from the cobs, dry in the sun, put in a bag and hang in a dry place. When wanted for the table, soak several hours, and cook slowly half an hour, without boiling.
The Ladies of the First Presbyterian Church in Dayton, Ohio, had published Presbyterian Cook Book in 1873, and it offered these options for canning, or “putting up,” sweet corn.
Dissolve one and one fourth ounces of tartaric acid in one half pint of water; cut the corn from the cob; put it in a vessel over the first, and bring to the boiling point; to each pint of corn allow one tablespoonful of this solution. Boil one half hour, stirring occasionally; then put the corn in quart cans, and seal tightly. When wanted for use, pour the corn into a bowl, and stir in two thirds of a teaspoonful of soda to each quart of corn. Let it stand one hour before cooking.
Cut the corn off the cob; pack very closely into quart cans; then solder so that every particle of air is excluded. Set the cans in a kettle of cold water and bring to a boil; let the corn boil for two and a half hours in this sized cans (larger cans will require more time). When done pour cold water into the kettle to cool the cans and enable you to remove them carefully.
Given those instructions for preserving corn, it can’t come as too much of a surprise that alternatives caught on quickly as they became available. That said, even the ideas in these recipes were relatively new. Canning things in glass jars dated back only to 1809, when French chef Nicholas Appert, in his effort to supply food to Napoleon’s fighting forces, discovered that if he heated tightly sealed glass jars or bottles, the food inside wouldn’t spoil. (It’s worth noting that this was fifty years before Louis Pasteur figured out why heating the food worked.) A year later, on the other side of the English Channel, Peter Durand came up with the idea of lining iron cans with tin, rather than using glass, since glass didn’t hold up as well during shipping. (Tin was chosen because it doesn’t react with food.) By 1820, Durand had developed the process well enough that he could supply substantial quantities of tinned foods to the British Navy. From England, canning in both jars and tin cans migrated to the United States.17
Because there were no factories for producing cans, they were, like most things at that time, made by hand. A strip of metal was cut out for the body of the can, and then tops and bottoms were created. The tube would be soldered into a cylinder, and then the hand-cut bottoms would be soldered onto one end. Once the tin was filled with food, the other end would be soldered in place. A skilled tinsmith could produce as many as sixty cans a day.18 Still, even with such slow production, tin cans quickly became popular. Soon, companies along the Eastern Seaboard were canning meat and seafood, especially oysters. Then, in 1849, Henry Evans, a tinsmith in Newark, New Jersey, patented a “Pendulum” press, which could punch out uniform tops and bottoms for cans.19
More improvements were made, and by 1850 two men could produce fifteen hundred cans in one day. And the men need not be nearly as skilled as the tinsmiths required for the handmade cans.20 Cans, however, if properly soldered closed, were not easy to open. Attacking with a hammer and chisel was the most common way to breach the container. A bayonet could work. Fortunately, in 1858, Ezra Warner of Connecticut invented the country’s first can opener. Because it created a jagged edge when it opened a can, it didn’t catch on with the public, but the U.S. Army used it—at least until something better came along.21 Fortunately, something better did come along in 1870, when William Lyman, also of Connecticut, patented a more user-friendly rotating-wheel can opener with a key on the side. While this would eventually be replaced by an improved can opener, that wouldn’t happen until 1925.22
The Civil War created a bit of urgency in the pursuit of more canned foods. Cans were still being used for meat and seafood at this point, but on April 8, 1862, Nathan and Isaac Winslow of Portland, Maine, patented a method of preserving green or sweet corn. This was the first time anyone had commercially preserved sweet corn, and the Winslow Packing Company made a great success out of canning this one vegetable.23 Tomatoes and beans followed but would never replace sweet corn in popularity.
During the Civil War, the army ordered huge quantities of canned foods to feed the troops. When soldiers returned home, they were enthusiastic about the cans of food that never spoiled, and soon everyone wanted canned food. By 1870, Americans were buying 30 million cans of food per year.24 Cookbooks from this era actually began to include recipes specifically for canned corn. Canned-corn production became so significant that it was actually tallied in the 1910 census, which showed that the number of cases of canned corn produced in that year was more than 13 million—most of it from the Midwest.25
With so many foods now being commercially processed, rather than simply prepared at home, there was concern in some parts about the quality and safety of these foods. Plus trains were moving foods across state borders—if something went wrong in one place, it could quickly become a widespread issue. Perhaps it is not so surprising that a farmboy from Illinois took an interest in this problem. In 1862, Abraham Lincoln founded the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which, along with being designed to make sure that every American involved in agriculture had access to information that would aid in all aspects of farming,26 was charged with protecting the quality of food supplies and, in time, with developing standards for food processing. So while the new government agency was created to help farmers, it also aided in building the industry that would make food more widely available—even as it increasingly separated consumers from producers.
The sooner food could be processed after picking, the better it would taste. So, to be near where things were grown, canning operations began moving into the Midwest even before the Civil War. The canning of corn was a huge success, but it still needed a lot of improvement. Even as canning spread across the country, the process was evolving, with developments seeming to alternate between the East and the Midwest. In 1884, John Winters of Mount Morris, New York, developed an efficient continuous corn cooker. In 1888, Welcome Sprague released onto the market the improved cutter he’d developed, to get kernels off the cobs. He then moved his business from New York to Illinois. Ears of corn were delivered in the husk, so in 1890, in Green Bay, Wisconsin, an inventor named William Sells devised a practical cornhusker. In 1903, in Greenwood, Indiana, John Jennings patented a method of steam cooking the contents of cans before they were sealed, while Ralph Polk created a series of belts and carriers that moved canned goods through the factory with greater speed. And so it went, with innovations appearing in rapid succession.27
Hundreds of small canning operations sprang up in the Midwest. Some of them are still around, though some have been bought by larger companies and others have changed their names. However, there are not nearly as many canning companies now as there were a hundred years ago.
When Thomas Hoopes offered land for an important junction of two railroads—the Lafayette, Bloomington, and Western Railroad, and the Chicago, Danville and Vincennes Railroad—the town that started up in 1871 around that key intersection was named Hoopeston. This central Illinois town, close to the Indiana border, was in the heart of corn country. In 1875, S. S. McCall established the Illinois Canning Company at Hoopeston, to can local corn to be shipped on the nearby train lines. McCall’s success encouraged others, and in 1878 the Hoopeston Canning Company opened—a company that later became part of Stokely–Van Camp, Inc.28 Soon there was a company producing the cans needed in Hoopeston’s canneries, and another creating the machines needed for the canning operations. The town became known as “the Sweet Corn Capital of the World.” Sadly, the companies that bought the canneries in Hoopeston began closing them down in the 1990s, after more than a hundred years of giving the town its identity.29 However, the cans (Silgan Container Corp.) are still made there, supplying the needs of the large food companies that have replaced or absorbed the smaller operations. And corn farming still thrives, along with Hoopeston’s annual Sweet Corn Festival, held each year since 1938. Still proud of its history as the Sweet Corn Capital, Hoopeston serves approximately fifty tons of free sweet corn each September.30
The Minnesota Valley Canning Company was founded in 1903 in Le Sueur, Minnesota. Today it is known as Green Giant. A number of corn canneries existed in Minnesota as early as the 1880s,31 but the company in Le Sueur was the one that became the most innovative. In 1924, Minnesota Valley Canning began to market cream-style corn in cans. When the vacuum pack was developed in 1926, Minnesota Canning Company was the first to use it.32 Techniques continued to improve and the canning of vegetables continued to grow, with consumers purchasing billions of cans per year by the mid-1900s. Still, among vegetables, sweet corn remained number one.33
Canning and drying remained the only preservation options until well into the 1900s. As the new century began, people were experimenting with ways to keep foods safe longer. If cold weather could help, was there some way to bring that cold indoors? Ice harvesting—cutting and shipping huge blocks of ice from lakes and rivers—both for iceboxes in homes and refrigerated train cars for shipping food, became big business.
People were also experimenting with freezing foods commercially (as opposed to the long tradition of just leaving things in the cold during northern winters). A few fairly clever techniques were developed, but they were all pretty much forgotten once Clarence Birdseye came on the scene. During trips to Labrador, Birdseye had been inspired by the way the region’s Native Americans, the Inuit, froze fish.34 A combination of ice and wind froze the fish rapidly. As a biologist, Birdseye could see that when the fish froze so quickly, ice crystals did not form internally. This meant the fish’s cellular structure would not be damaged by sharp crystals, so when thawed, the fish tasted as fresh as if it had just been caught, plus the texture was not damaged. Birds-eye returned to New York determined to find a way to reproduce the effect of that flash freezing. His method was perfected by 1929, and the patent was granted in 1930.35 Birdseye packed food into waxed-cardboard cartons and then rapidly froze the packed foods under pressure between two metal plates chilled to -25°F. Vegetables could be frozen solid in thirty minutes. This is still essentially the process used for most frozen vegetables.36
The success of Birdseye’s freezing technique was explosive. Local markets were soon won over, and by 1944 Birdseye’s company was shipping frozen food across the nation.37 Self-service supermarkets were a relatively new concept, but they were the perfect place for prepacked foods, such as those produced by Birdseye’s freezing process. By the 1940s, many families had cars, and they enjoyed shopping.38 Plus, in a car, they could get home quickly with their frozen food. With home freezers increasingly common after World War II, frozen food soon became a way of life. Within a few decades, people hardly remembered independent stores, let alone cracker barrels and buying in bulk, or even more remotely, picking and processing at home.
Patents kept flash-freezing in Birdseye’s court for a while. However, once the technology was made public, other food-processing companies soon adopted it. For example, Green Giant began marketing frozen foods in 1961 and in 1969 became the first company to freeze whole ears of corn.39
Chelsea Milling Company, in Chelsea, Michigan, has been in the Holmes family for four generations. What differentiated it from other, long-vanished small mills started in small towns in the late 1800s was an idea that Mabel White Holmes had in 1930. Mabel, wife of the company’s second president, Howard, thought there should be some way for anyone to be able to make good biscuits, regardless of their experience or culinary inclinations, so she created premixed packages of ingredients and simple instructions that could guarantee good results, easily and quickly. Jiffy mixes, as she named them, were the first prepared baking-mix products on the market. Mabel, who became company president herself in 1936, would see Jiffy mixes grow to be the company’s primary business, largely because during the 1940s, women who had previously stayed home and cooked from scratch were filling the jobs created by World War II. Imitators soon followed Mabel Holmes’s lead, and grocery-store shelves began to fill with prepared baking mixes. Cooking had again been transformed. Then, in 1950, Chelsea Milling introduced what would become its most successful product by far—a mix for corn muffins. Today, according to Chelsea’s vice president Jack Kennedy, the company uses approximately 33.5 million pounds of cornmeal per year. The cornmeal is sourced from a 200- to 300-mile radius of Chelsea (including Illinois and northern Indiana), and the corn muffin mix is prepared in batches of ten thousand pounds. During the busy fall baking season, corn muffin mix is produced at a rate of 1.5 million boxes a day. So Mabel’s idea is still a huge part of getting corn to the table across the United States.
Other developments were in the arena of new varieties of corn, rather than new ways of processing. For example, agricultural researchers at Green Giant developed a special type of sweet corn that was ideal for the vacuum-packing technology they were the first to adopt. The corn developed for their Niblets brand was both more tender and easier to cut from the cob.40
Even newer are the corn varieties known as supersweets. While sweet corn stayed sweet longer than green corn, it did so only for a few days longer—which is not terribly helpful if a day is lost getting it to the store or food processor. About the third day, the sweetness wasn’t so noticeable. In the 1950s, John Laughnan, a corn geneticist at the University of Illinois, was studying the genetic material of sweet corn, and he discovered that one gene seemed to lead to the storing of more sugar. He wondered if he could breed corn that took advantage of this tendency. His reports garnered little enthusiasm, but he continued to work on breeding and inbreeding sweet corns to create a supersweet variety, which he released in 1961. For the next twenty years, Laughnan’s supersweet corn began to sell in the United States and Japan, while at the same time, other researchers began working on the concept of breeding additional supersweet varieties. At the University of Illinois, Professor “Dusty” Rhodes had developed a supersweet that had kernels more tender than Laughnan’s. Other researchers focused on breeding the supersweet corn for disease resistance. By the 1980s, most of the corn bred for long-distance shipping was supersweet. Around the year 2000, researchers at several companies had developed supersweet corn varieties that combined the shelf life of Laughnan’s corn with the tenderness of Rhodes’s corn, plus the disease resistance also identified by University of Illinois researchers.
The supersweets are good for consumers, but they’re great for processors, as these corn varieties give them more time before sweetness is affected. So while food-processing technology grew up to bring corn to more people, corn was also being changed, to take greater advantage of the technology.41
Today we have more sweet-corn options than ever, yet the “preserved” sweet corn, canned or frozen, remains the number-one vegetable in the United States. To be near the source, many of the largest and best-known food processors, including Green Giant and Birds Eye, continue to make their homes in the Midwest.
Fortunately, canned and frozen are not the only options available. Despite the fact that urban growth and, to an even greater extent, suburban sprawl have pushed farms farther and farther out, a resurgence of interest in local and fresh foods has led to growing interest in farmers’ markets and community-supported agriculture. Plus, there is an increasing interest in raising heirloom varieties of corn in backyards and on community plots. So today, if they wish, people can return to the schedule of the 1800s, eating fresh corn in the summer and saving the preserved corn for the winter.
1. Note on the opening poem: Hasty pudding is essentially cornmeal mush, sometimes cooked with a little molasses. Even within the poem, Barlow comments on the many names by which the dish is known, including mush, polenta, polanta, and suppawn—but as far as Barlow is concerned, these names are aberrations.
Thy name is Hasty Pudding! thus our sires
Were wont to greet thee fuming from their fires;
And while they argued in thy just defence
With logic clear, they thus explained the sense:
“In haste the boiling cauldron, o’er the blaze,
Receives and cooks the ready-powdered maize;
In haste ’tis served, and then in equal haste,
With cooling milk, we make the sweet repast.
No carving to be done, no knife to grate
The tender ear, and wound the stony plate;
But the smooth spoon, just fitted to the lip,
And taught with art the yielding mass to dip,
By frequent journeys to the bowl well stored,
Performs the hasty honors of the board.
It was in New England that hasty pudding had its home, and its name lives on in Harvard’s venerable theater society, the symbol for which is a pot over a fire. Outside of New England, it was mush.
