Maize is perhaps the most thoroughly engineered of all the plants that human beings eat, transformed so completely from its wild ancestor that for many years botanists could not agree what that ancestor had been. The parent is now known beyond doubt to be teosinte, specifically the Balsas teosinte (Zea mays subsp. parviglumis), a wild grass of the Balsas River valley in Guerrero, in southwestern Mexico, that looks so unlike a maize plant that the relationship long seemed incredible. Wild teosinte bears not a fat cob but a small, branching spike carrying a single row of perhaps a dozen hard, triangular seeds, each sealed in a stony case so durable that the grain can pass through an animal's gut and germinate on the far side. To turn this into the great soft, many-rowed, naked-grained cob of cultivated maize required a series of changes so profound that maize cannot now reproduce itself without human help at all: its kernels are bound tight to the cob and wrapped in a husk that will not open of its own accord, so that a dropped ear simply rots in a tangle of its own seedlings rather than dispersing them.
The peoples of the Balsas valley achieved this transformation over a span of at least four thousand years of deliberate, continuous selection, beginning around 7000 BCE, and it ranks amongst the supreme feats of plant breeding in the whole history of agriculture. A handful of key mutations were involved, above all in the gene teosinte branched 1, which suppresses the wild plant's many side-branches and concentrates its energy into a single great cob, and in the genes governing the hard fruitcase, which selection stripped away to expose the soft, edible kernel. Genetic studies published in the early twenty-first century, tracing the DNA of maize landraces back to their wild relatives, confirm that all the world's maize descends from a single domestication event in this one river valley, rather than from several independent beginnings, making the Guerrero highlands the cradle of what is now, by sheer volume of production, the greatest crop on earth. The English language preserves a useful ambiguity here: 'maize', from the Taíno by way of Spanish, is the precise international term for Zea mays, whilst 'corn', which in older British usage meant any cereal grain at all, came in the Americas to mean this grain in particular, so that the same plant is the maize of the botanist and the corn of the American field.
The journey of maize divides cleanly into two great chapters: a slow, deep diffusion across the Americas over thousands of years, and a sudden, explosive spread across the rest of the world in a single century after 1492. In the first chapter, the grain moved out of its Mesoamerican cradle along the indigenous trade and migration networks that knitted the two American continents together. By around 3000 BCE it had reached the Andes, where the peoples of Peru bred it to thrive at altitude and developed the large-kernelled choclo and the sacred fermented chicha; by at least 2000 BCE it had spread south through the Amazon and north through the deserts of the southwest into the eastern woodlands of North America, where by the first millennium CE it stood at the heart of the Three Sisters agriculture of the Haudenosaunee and a hundred other nations. Wherever it travelled, it was accompanied by the knowledge of how to make it nourishing, above all the Mesoamerican technique of nixtamalisation, the soaking and cooking of the grain in an alkaline solution of lime or wood ash that unlocks its bound niacin and transforms its protein.
The second chapter began when Columbus carried maize back to Spain in 1493, and here the speed of the spread is the astonishing thing. Within a single century the grain had reached West Africa, the Ottoman Empire, Italy, the Balkans, India, and China, a global diffusion faster than that of almost any crop before it, driven by maize's extraordinary productivity, its tolerance of poor soils, and the reach of the new oceanic trading empires. The Portuguese role was decisive, for in the sixteenth century they operated the most extensive maritime network on earth, and their ships carried maize to the Gold Coast of West Africa, to Goa and the Indian coast, and onward into Southeast Asia within a generation or two of its arrival in Europe. The grain's reception varied enormously with the place. In much of southern Europe and the Balkans it became the polenta and mămăligă of the rural poor, prolific and filling but, eaten without nixtamalisation, the cause of devastating epidemics of the niacin-deficiency disease pellagra, a tragic consequence of taking the plant but not the indispensable technique that had always travelled with it in the Americas. In West Africa, by contrast, maize was embraced so completely that it displaced the native millets and sorghums across whole regions and transformed the agricultural basis of the continent within two centuries, spreading inland from the coast with remarkable speed. And in one of the strangest chapters of all, maize crossed the Pacific directly from Mexico to the Philippines aboard the Manila galleons, bypassing Europe entirely and reaching Asia by the back door. By 1900 the grain of a single Mexican river valley was feeding, fattening, or fermenting on every inhabited continent.
Maize is the most produced grain on earth by volume, with global production now exceeding one billion metric tonnes a year, a figure that outstrips both wheat and rice and reflects the plant's astonishing versatility and yield. Yet the bare tonnage conceals a profound division in what the grain is actually for, a division that runs along the line between the rich industrial economies and the rest of the world. In much of Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of Southeast Asia, maize is food in the most direct and vital sense: it is the staff of life, ground to masa for the tortilla, simmered into the porridges called ugali, sadza, mealie pap, and mămăligă, and counted as the single largest source of daily calories for the majority of the population in countries including Nigeria, Mexico, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In the United States, the world's greatest producer, the same plant leads almost a wholly different life. There maize is overwhelmingly an industrial raw material rather than a food eaten as such: roughly forty per cent of the harvest is turned into ethanol to be burned as motor fuel, and a further thirty-six per cent is fed to cattle, pigs, and poultry, so that only around ten per cent is consumed directly by people, the balance feeding a manufacturing chain of extraordinary reach. From maize come high-fructose corn syrup, the sweetener of countless processed foods and soft drinks; cornstarch and corn oil; and a vast array of industrial derivatives, from biodegradable plastics to adhesives and pharmaceuticals. The grain thus stands at once as the most intimate sustenance of the world's poor and the hidden feedstock of the world's richest food system, the humble cob of the Mesoamerican field and the abstract commodity of the global exchange. Eaten fresh on the cob, popped, milled, nixtamalised, fermented, or refined into syrup, maize is amongst the most protean of all crops, and its reach into modern life extends far beyond the plate.
Historical Journey of Corn
Balsas River Valley, Mexico — c. 7000 BCE
In the Balsas River valley of Guerrero, in the warm lowlands of southwestern Mexico, the wild grass teosinte was drawn into cultivation and, over at least four thousand years of patient selection, transformed beyond recognition into the great soft-grained cob of maize, the plant that would feed every civilisation the Americas produced. The peoples who accomplished this (the line running through the Olmec, the Maya, and the Aztec) did far more than enlarge the cob; they discovered the indispensable technique of nixtamalisation, soaking and cooking the dried grain in an alkaline solution of lime or wood ash, which softens the kernel for grinding, allows the dough to bind, and unlocks the bound niacin that makes maize nutritionally complete rather than a slow road to deficiency. Upon this technique an entire culinary and sacred order was built. The treated grain was ground on the stone metate into masa, the fundamental dough of Mesoamerica, and from masa came the tortilla, the flatbread eaten at every meal and used as plate, spoon, and food at once; the tamale, masa enriched and steamed in a wrapping of husk or leaf; and atole, the warm maize gruel drunk at dawn and at festivals. Maize was not merely sustenance but the substance of life itself, for the Maya held that the gods had fashioned humankind from maize dough, and the grain stood at the centre of the calendar, the ritual, and the cosmology of the whole region. Its cooking still anchors the Mexican table, from the everyday tortilla to the festival pozole and the dark, many-spiced mole spooned over it.
Andes, Peru — c. 3000 BCE
Carried south along the indigenous trade and migration routes that linked Mesoamerica to the southern continent, maize reached the Andean civilisations of Peru and spread through the Amazon basin, where the peoples of the high cordillera bred it into forms entirely their own. The great achievement of the Andean cultivators was to adapt a lowland tropical grass to the thin air and cold nights of the altiplano, developing varieties suited to altitudes at which no Mesoamerican maize could have set seed, amongst them the choclo, the large-kernelled Andean maize whose grains are the size of a thumbnail, starchy and faintly sweet, eaten boiled with a slab of fresh cheese. From the fresh grain the Andean cooks made humitas, the tender parcels of ground young maize seasoned and steamed in the cob's own husk, the southern cousin of the Mexican tamale. Above all they made chicha, the maize beer brewed from the grain, sometimes by chewing it so that the enzymes of the saliva convert its starch to fermentable sugar, which became far more than a drink: chicha was the sacred ceremonial liquor of the Inca Empire, poured in libation to the sun and the earth, brewed in vast quantity for the state festivals, and central to the reciprocal feasting through which the Inca bound their subjects to the throne. In the Andes, as in Mexico, maize was at once the daily food, the festal drink, and a substance charged with the sacred.
Venezuela and Colombia — c. 1200 BCE
Long before any Spanish sail appeared off the northern coast of South America, the Timoto-Cuica of the Venezuelan Andes, the Chibcha of the Colombian highlands, and the coastal peoples of the Caribbean shore had been grinding fresh maize into a dough and cooking it on heated clay griddles into the round, flat cakes they called arepas, the word itself thought to descend from erepa, the term for maize in the Cumanagoto tongue of the eastern coast. This was a maize culture wholly distinct from that of Mexico, for the arepa tradition used fresh or dried grain ground without the alkaline nixtamalisation of the Mesoamerican masa, and it arose independently as a parallel civilisation of the grain across the whole of northern South America and the Caribbean littoral. When the Spanish came in the sixteenth century and set down their accounts, the arepa was already ancient, a staple present at every meal in every community, baked on the budare, the clay griddle, exactly as it had been for some three thousand years. The tradition has endured undiminished and diversified into many forms: the sweet, tender arepa de choclo griddled from young maize, the split arepa stuffed with the avocado-and-chicken salad called reina pepiada, and the thin, folded cachapa of fresh corn. To this day the arepa remains the daily bread of Venezuela and Colombia, eaten morning and night by some fifty million people, one of the oldest living maize preparations on earth.
Caribbean Islands — c. 1000 BCE
Maize spread from the South American mainland out into the Caribbean islands, carried by the Arawak and Taíno peoples who had themselves migrated up the island chain from the Orinoco, and by the time Columbus made his landfall in 1492 it was a staple food across the Greater Antilles. The Taíno, who called the grain mahiz, ground it into flour for flatbreads and simmered it into porridges, and it was this Taíno word, and these Taíno fields, that gave the world both the plant and its name. The encounter has a particular weight in the history of maize, for it was from the Caribbean that Columbus carried the first seeds back to Spain in 1493, the act that opened the whole Columbian Exchange and set maize on its global journey. On the islands themselves the older maize tradition endured beneath the layers of Spanish, African, and later colonial settlement that followed: the maize porridges persist as funche in Puerto Rico and Cuba and as cou-cou in Barbados, thickened and enriched in the African manner and eaten with coconut milk, okra, and salt fish, a living thread from the Taíno hearth into the Afro-Caribbean kitchen of today. The grain that left the Caribbean to conquer the world never wholly left the islands that first sent it forth.
Haudenosaunee Homeland, Eastern North America — c. 1000 CE
By the first millennium CE, the maize-centred Three Sisters agricultural complex had spread northward from its Mesoamerican origins throughout the entire eastern woodlands of North America, carried by successive waves of migration and intertribal exchange across several thousand years. By 1000 CE it was firmly established among the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy), the Wendat (Huron), the Lenape, and dozens of other nations across the northeastern interior. In the Three Sisters system, corn occupied the structural role: the tall stalk provided a climbing scaffold for beans, whilst the canopy of broad leaves offered partial shade that moderated soil temperature. The Haudenosaunee grew multiple named varieties of corn suited to specific uses, from the white flour corn ground for soups and breads to the hard flint corn dried for winter storage. Corn was not merely a food in this tradition but a being of sacred significance: the Three Sisters were understood as living spirits who sustained and protected one another as the plants did in the field. The transmission of corn cultivation knowledge to English settlers arriving on the northeastern coast in the early seventeenth century was one of the decisive acts of the first colonial decades: it was indigenous Three Sisters knowledge, shared across the contact boundary, that prevented the starvation of the earliest English settlements and ensured their survival through brutal winters.
Spain and Galicia — c. 1493
Columbus returned from his first voyage in 1493 bearing maize seeds amongst the marvels he laid before Ferdinand and Isabella at court, and Spain became the grain's first foothold in the Old World. From the Andalusian ports it spread through the Iberian Peninsula, but it found its warmest welcome not in the hot, dry south, where the wheat and the vine reigned, but in the cool, wet, green northwest, in Galicia and Asturias, where the Atlantic climate of frequent rain and mild summers suited a moisture-loving grass far better than it suited the established Mediterranean cereals. There maize took hold as the grain of the rural and maritime poor, and Galicia developed broa, the dense, close-crumbed bread of maize meal bound with a little rye that became the daily bread of the peasant farmstead and the fishing village, eaten with the caldos and seafood of the region. Spain's role, however, was as much a doorway as a destination, for from the Spanish ports maize passed quickly to neighbouring Portugal, and through the Portuguese seaborne empire it was carried to Africa, to Brazil, and to India within a single generation. The grain that Columbus set down at the Spanish court would, by way of Iberia, reach three further continents faster than any crop in history.
Cape Verde — c. 1495
American corn reached the Cape Verde archipelago almost as soon as it reached the Iberian Peninsula itself. Portuguese navigators had used the mid-Atlantic islands as the primary waystation on Atlantic return voyages since the 1460s, and corn seeds were among the earliest American cultivars to pass through on their way into Old World trading networks. In the volcanic valleys of Santiago and São Nicolau, where the soil was deep and the growing season long, the Creole community forming in the first decades of colonial settlement adopted dried corn as a dietary staple. The technique of drying whole kernels, soaking them overnight, and simmering them for hours until tender produced the canjica that became the structural foundation of cachupa: Cape Verde's slow-cooked national stew, in which American corn is braised with dried beans, root vegetables, olive oil, and turmeric in a single pot that contains the material history of the Portuguese Atlantic empire. Cape Verde occupied a singular position in the Columbian Exchange: not merely a transit node on the way from the Americas to Africa and Asia, but one of the earliest places outside the Americas where corn was embedded into an entirely new culinary tradition with no antecedent on any of the three continents whose ingredients shaped it.
Goiás and Central Brazil — c. 1500
Maize had been cultivated in Brazil by its indigenous peoples for thousands of years before any European arrived, carried south from Mesoamerica through the long chains of trade and migration that bound the continent together. When the Portuguese made landfall in 1500 they found the Tupi, the Guaraní, and others growing the grain and using it in fermented drinks, in porridges, and above all in the fresh-maize paste they called pa'muña, the soft pulp of young grain seasoned and steamed in the cob's own husk. The Portuguese settlers took up and adapted these native preparations rather than displacing them, and maize wove itself ever more deeply into Brazilian food culture as the colony grew. By the eighteenth century it had become the centrepiece of the Festa Junina, the great June harvest festival held at the time of the maize crop, whose sacred foods are all of maize: pamonha, the direct descendant of the Tupi pa'muña, fresh-maize paste steamed in husks; canjica, the hominy of softened white kernels simmered in coconut milk and sugar; and curau, the smooth pudding of grated green maize; alongside the bolo de milho, the moist maize cake of the festival table. In the maize-growing interior of Goiás and Minas Gerais the roadside pamonharias still line the highways, selling the steamed husk-parcels to travellers, a living continuity from the indigenous hearth to the modern road.
Minho and Northern Portugal — c. 1515
Portugal received maize early, whether by way of Brazil, its colony from 1500, or directly from its Spanish neighbours in the years after Columbus, and it took up the grain with particular enthusiasm in the wet, green northwest, in the provinces of Minho and Trás-os-Montes. As in the Spanish Galicia just across the border, the cool, rainy, Atlantic-watered climate of these uplands suited the moisture-loving grass better than the established Mediterranean cereals, and maize swiftly became the grain of the rural poor. Broa, the dense, heavy bread of maize meal worked with a little rye and risen slowly, became the everyday bread of northern Portugal and the inseparable companion of caldo verde, the soup of shredded kale, potato, and a slice of smoky sausage that is amongst the most beloved of all Portuguese dishes. Portugal's importance to the maize story, however, reaches far beyond its own kitchen, for as the foremost seaborne trading empire of the sixteenth century it was the Portuguese, more than anyone, who carried the grain efficiently and rapidly to West Africa, East Africa, India, and Southeast Asia. The merchant ships out of Lisbon were the hidden hinge on which maize's whole Old World diffusion turned, scattering the seed of a Mexican valley across half the globe within a few decades.
Goa, Portuguese India — c. 1520
Portugal captures Goa on India's Malabar Coast in 1510, establishing the administrative capital of their Asian empire: the gateway through which every new world crop entering India would pass. Within a decade, ships from Lisbon begin arriving at Goa's harbour carrying corn, chilli, tomato, sweet potato, and papaya alongside the spices, silver, and textiles of the established trade. Goa is a colonial control point: a port of entry and redistribution, not a culinary destination for corn. The Portuguese trade extensively with the Mughal court and with merchant networks across Gujarat, Rajasthan, and the Deccan, and new-world crops spread inland along these corridors. From Goa, corn moves northward through Kathiawar and Rajputana into the Punjab, following the same overland trade routes that connected the Portuguese coast to the Mughal imperial cities of Agra and Lahore. It is chilli, not corn, that transforms Goan cuisine; vindaloo, xacuti, and sorpotel all bear the mark of the Portuguese capsicum far more deeply than of corn. Corn's role at Goa was the most important one: transit. It entered here and spread across the subcontinent; Goa simply opened the door.
Ghana and West Africa — c. 1550
Portuguese traders introduced maize to West Africa in the mid-sixteenth century along the trading routes of the Gold Coast, and the grain spread through the Guinea coast and into the interior with a speed that has few parallels in agricultural history, taken up by the Akan, the Ga, the Ewe, the Yoruba, and a host of other peoples. Maize was prolific, quick to mature, and well suited to the West African climate, and within a few generations it had displaced the native sorghum and millet across whole regions to become a primary grain from Senegal to Nigeria. The West African cooks did not simply boil the new grain but folded it into their existing traditions of fermentation, and from that meeting came some of the defining foods of the region: in Ghana the Ga developed kenkey, a dough of maize soured by several days of fermentation, then wrapped in maize husks or plantain leaves and steamed, eaten with fish and fierce pepper sauce; alongside it stand banku and the fermented maize porridge ogi. Yet this chapter cannot be told without its shadow, for the very ships that carried maize to the African coast were the ships of the Atlantic slave trade, and the same grain was loaded aboard the slavers as cheap, storable provision to feed the enslaved on the Middle Passage. The two halves of the Columbian Exchange, the grain and the human cargo, moved on the same decks, and the spread of maize through Africa is inseparable from the greatest forced migration in human history.
Anatolia, Ottoman Empire — c. 1550
Maize reached the Ottoman Empire through the Mediterranean trade routes in the sixteenth century, and the Turkish name for it preserves a charming geographical confusion: the grain was called mısır, the Turkish word for Egypt, in the belief that it had come from the Nile, and mısır remains the ordinary Turkish word for maize to this day. From the imperial heartland the grain spread through Anatolia, up into the Balkans, and along the rainy Black Sea coast of northern Turkey, where the damp climate suited it so well that maize became the staple grain of the region, displacing wheat in the local bread. In Istanbul roasted maize became, and remains, a beloved street food, the cobs charred over braziers and sold by vendors on every busy corner and waterfront, scented with the smoke of the coals. The Ottoman kitchen also worked the grain into soups and porridges seasoned in its own characteristic register, with cumin, red pepper flakes, and yoghurt, and into the maize breads of the Black Sea provinces. Through the wide reach of the Ottoman lands, maize travelled onward into the Balkan highlands and the Danubian principalities, where it would become, even more than in Turkey itself, the very foundation of the peasant diet.
Yunnan and Southwest China — c. 1555
Maize arrived in China by two routes in the middle of the sixteenth century: overland along the old Silk Road from Central Asia into the northwestern provinces of Gansu and Shaanxi, and by sea through the Portuguese traders who frequented Guangzhou on the southern coast. The Chinese names register both its strangeness and its kinship with the grains already known, for it was called yùshǔshǔ, 'jade millet', or simply yùmǐ, 'jade rice'. Maize spread most rapidly in the poorer, hillier southwestern provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan, where it would grow on slopes and thin soils that could not support paddy rice, transforming the subsistence farming of the uplands and allowing cultivation to climb the hillsides. Its impact on Chinese history was demographic as much as culinary: by the Qing dynasty maize, together with the sweet potato and the groundnut, had become one of the crops that fed the vast population growth of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Chinese kitchen, however, treated maize not as the bulk bread grain it became in Europe and Africa but as a vegetable in its own right, steamed and roasted on the cob and, above all, stirred into soups. Yùmǐ gēng, the thick, velvety egg-drop sweetcorn soup, is amongst the most widely cooked of all Chinese home soups, the kernels lending it a gentle sweetness and the beaten egg drawn through it in fine threads.
Veneto and Lombardy, Northern Italy — c. 1560
Maize arrived in northern Italy in the second half of the sixteenth century and was embraced with extraordinary enthusiasm by the peasantry of the Po Valley, the broad, fertile, well-watered plain that proved ideally suited to the new grain. In the Veneto and Lombardy it displaced the older millet almost overnight as the staple of the rural poor, for it yielded far more heavily and could be grown on the same ground. By the early seventeenth century polenta, the thick yellow porridge of maize meal stirred for the better part of an hour over the fire and eaten soft from the pot or cooled, sliced, and grilled, had become the defining food of northern Italian peasant life, filling, cheap, and endlessly adaptable, served beneath stews, cheeses, and small birds. Yet the same dependence brought disaster, for the Italian poor, eating maize without the nixtamalisation that the peoples of Mexico had always practised, fell prey to pellagra, the wasting niacin-deficiency disease that swept the maize-eating populations of the valley through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and was for a long time mistaken for an infection or a curse. Only with a more varied diet and, later, an understanding of the vitamin did the scourge recede. Today polenta has been wholly rehabilitated and even gentrified, as much a feature of the smart restaurant menu as of the old farmhouse table, its history as a food of poverty and hardship largely forgotten.
Nigeria, West Africa — c. 1560
Maize spread eastward from the Gold Coast into the Niger Delta and the Yoruba, Hausa, and Igbo heartlands by the middle of the sixteenth century, and there, as across West Africa, it was absorbed not as a wholly new food but into the deep existing tradition of fermented grain porridges. The peoples of what is now Nigeria adapted to maize the souring techniques they had long applied to sorghum and millet, steeping the ground grain in water for around three days so that wild fermentation sours it, mellows its flavour, and improves both its keeping and its nutrition, before it is strained, boiled, and eaten as a smooth, tart porridge. This is ogi, known as ogi or koko amongst the Yoruba and as akamu amongst the Igbo, and it occupies a place in Nigerian life far beyond the merely nutritional. Light and easily digested, it is the first solid food given to infants and the restorative fed to the sick and the elderly; it is served at the naming ceremony held on the eighth day of a child's life, at weddings, and at funerals; and it is eaten every morning at millions of breakfast tables, often with fried bean cake or pap. Alongside it the stiffer maize dishes such as tuwo masara anchor the main meal. Ogi is thus at once the most ordinary and the most ceremonially charged of all the maize foods of West Africa, the grain woven into the rites of birth, marriage, and death.
Mindanao, Philippines — c. 1565
Maize reached the Philippines not by the long Atlantic and Indian Ocean route that brought it to the rest of Asia, but directly across the Pacific aboard the Manila galleons, the Spanish treasure fleet established in 1565 that ran each year between Acapulco in New Spain and Manila. This is amongst the most remarkable chapters in the grain's whole global journey, a direct trans-Pacific leap from the Mesoamerican homeland of maize to Southeast Asia, bypassing Europe and Africa altogether and carrying the Mexican grain almost straight from one shore of its native ocean to the far side. In Mindanao, the great southern island, maize took hold so completely that it displaced rice itself as the everyday staple, making this one of the very few places in all of Asia where the daily bread of the majority is maize rather than rice, ground and steamed into the grits-like binatog and porridges that fill the Mindanao table. Most distinctively, the Filipino kitchen married the Mexican grain to the defining ingredient of the archipelago, coconut milk, producing dishes that belong to no other maize tradition on earth: ginataang mais, the sweet warm porridge of maize kernels and glutinous rice simmered in coconut milk, and the iced version mais con yelo, and a whole family of maize-and-coconut preparations that are wholly and inventively Filipino.
American South, North America — c. 1600 CE
Maize had been cultivated by the indigenous peoples of North America for millennia before the first Europeans arrived, and it was on this native foundation that the colonists of the American South came wholly to depend, learning the cultivation, the storage, and the cooking of the grain from the Cherokee and the other nations amongst whom they settled. By the seventeenth century maize was the essential crop of the southern colonies, the grain that fed the settlers through the hungry years and underpinned the whole agricultural economy. Into this world came enslaved Africans, who recognised in maize a grain close kin to the one they had known and fermented at home in West Africa, and who carried their maize-cooking traditions into the kitchens of the plantation South. From the meeting of indigenous, African, and European hands came the defining maize foods of the region: cornbread, the batter of maize meal baked golden and crusted in a screaming-hot cast-iron skillet; hominy, the kernels softened by nixtamalisation in lye; and grits, the coarsely ground hominy simmered to a soft porridge and eaten at breakfast across the South. The Cherokee themselves continued their own ancient maize cookery, as in kanuchi, the soup of hominy and pounded black walnuts. Cornbread above all became the bread of the southern table, a food at once of poverty and survival and of fierce cultural pride, carrying the layered history of the region in a single skillet.
Punjab, India — c. 1600
Maize reached the Indian subcontinent through the Portuguese and Arab trade routes of the sixteenth century, entering through the coastal ports and spreading inland along the established corridors of commerce, but it was in the Punjab, the fertile five-river plain of the northwest, that it found its most wholehearted Indian home. The Punjab's cold, dry winters suited the grain, and its long tradition of thick, hearty, unleavened flatbreads gave maize an obvious role, for the flour ground from the grain, makki ka atta, became the basis of makki ki roti, the dense, golden, crumbly winter bread of the Punjabi countryside, patted out by hand because the glutenless maize dough will not roll, and griddled over the fire. From October to February it is eaten with sarson ka saag, the slow-cooked purée of mustard greens enriched with butter, and the pairing of makki di roti te sarson da saag is amongst the most iconic and beloved combinations in all of Indian food, the very taste of a Punjabi winter. It is celebrated at Lohri, the bonfire festival that marks the winter harvest and the turning of the year, and served from the humblest roadside dhaba to the grandest table, eaten across the whole Punjab from Lahore to Ludhiana, the Mexican grain made utterly and unmistakably Punjabi.
Serbia and the Dinaric Highlands — c. 1600
Maize arrived in the Ottoman Balkans in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, carried up from the imperial heartland through the trade networks of the empire and spreading through Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, and North Macedonia. In the harsh, thin-soiled, mountainous country of the Dinaric highlands, where wheat struggled and the growing season was short, maize proved a reliable and productive crop, a grain that would yield where little else would, and the highland peoples adopted it with the gratitude of those for whom it meant the difference between sufficiency and hunger. From the maize meal the mountain Serbs, Montenegrins, and Herzegovinians made kačamak, a stiff porridge worked and beaten vigorously over the fire until smooth and dense, then enriched with the region's two great pastoral products, the rich clotted cream called kajmak and crumbled sheep's cheese, so that the humble grain is carried by the fat and salt of the high summer pastures. The very name kačamak derives from the Turkish, a small linguistic fossil of the Ottoman route by which the grain arrived. In Montenegro especially, kačamak s kajmakom became the defining dish of highland identity, served in the mountain inns, at family feasts, and at the everyday table alike, a plain food eaten with fierce pastoral pride and bound up with the self-image of a proud and rugged mountain people.
Wallachia and Moldavia, Romania — c. 1650
Maize reached the Danubian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia in the seventeenth century by way of the Ottoman trade routes, and the Romanian peasantry took it up with a speed and completeness rarely matched anywhere. There was a further, harder reason for its hold: maize, as a new crop, often fell outside the grain tithes and taxes that the Ottoman overlords levied on wheat, so the peasant could grow it and keep it, and it became the food that was eaten whilst the wheat was sold or surrendered. By the eighteenth century mămăligă, the thick porridge of maize meal, had wholly replaced the older millet porridge as the staple of the Romanian countryside, eaten at very nearly every meal. Cooked in the round-bottomed iron ceaun over an open fire, beaten smooth, and turned out in a steaming golden mound onto a wooden board to be cut not with a knife but with a taut thread or a length of string, mămăligă became the very symbol of Romanian rural endurance, the bread of the poor that was also the comfort of the home. The great writers of the Romanian canon, Creangă, Eminescu, and Sadoveanu amongst them, wrote of it with warmth and reverence, and it remains to this day a point of fierce national pride and a touchstone of Romanian cultural identity, the plain maize porridge that fed a nation.
Kenya and the Great Lakes Region — c. 1700
Maize reached the East African interior in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by way of the Swahili coast, carried inland from the great Indian Ocean trading ports of Mombasa and Zanzibar that the Portuguese and later the Arabs controlled, and from the coast it spread into the highlands of the Great Lakes region with extraordinary speed, displacing the native millet and sorghum to become the primary starch of a vast swathe of the continent. The Kikuyu, the Luo, the Luhya, and the other peoples of the region each took up the grain and made it the foundation of the daily meal, ground to meal and cooked into a stiff porridge known by many names: ugali in Swahili, and its cognates across the region into posho in Uganda. Ugali is cooked by stirring the maize meal into boiling water and working it over the heat until it stiffens into a dense, smooth, almost solid mass that is then turned out and broken off in pieces by hand, pinched into a scoop, and used to lift the relish that accompanies it. Ugali with sukuma wiki, the braised collard or kale greens cooked down with tomato and onion, is the everyday meal of the majority of Kenyans, plain, filling, and inexpensive. Measured by the sheer number of daily servings it provides to the people of East Africa, ugali ranks amongst the most eaten foods on the whole of the earth, the Mexican grain become the daily bread of a continent's heart.
KwaZulu-Natal and Southern Africa — c. 1750
Maize reached southern Africa by two converging routes: overland from the Portuguese-controlled coast of Mozambique, where the grain had arrived through the Indian Ocean trade, and by sea through the Dutch East India Company's refreshment station at the Cape of Good Hope, established in 1652 to provision the ships rounding the continent. The very name by which maize is known across the region records the Portuguese vector, for 'mealie' descends from the Portuguese milho, the word for the grain, filtered through the Dutch and Afrikaans mielie. The Zulu, the Xhosa, the Sotho, and the Tswana adopted the grain with extraordinary speed, and within a century it had displaced the native sorghum and millet to become the dominant starch of the whole of southern Africa. Mealie pap, the stiff porridge of white maize meal cooked until dense and crumbly, became the nutritional foundation of southern African life, eaten morning and evening from the remote rural homestead to the heart of the urban township, the one food that crosses every line of class, culture, and ethnicity in a deeply divided region. From the same grain come the dishes of the wider region, the nshima of Malawi eaten with a groundnut relish, and the maize meal added to the traditional sorghum beer umqombothi brewed for the Zulu and Xhosa ceremony. Plain, white, and ubiquitous, mealie pap is to southern Africa what bread is to Europe and rice to the East, the very definition of food.
