In our last episode we parched corn we spent time over the fire getting these kernels ready parching
them up now we have to prepare them turn them into something you can actually eat thanks for joining
us today. Let's hear what Benjamin Franklin has to say about this next step he says "that which
is parched is pounded into powder in mortars this being sifted will keep long fit for use an Indian
will travel far and subsist long on a small bag of it taking only 6 or 8 ounces of it per day
mixed with water" so we've got our mortar here and we need to pound it up into a powder that's what
we're going to do. Well let's get the pounding this stuff up I've got my my mortar now this
one is not as big as it probably typically would have had you can imagine a log this big around
and maybe this tall and a much bigger stamper this is a very small version so it's going to
work nonetheless probably a lot more portable. It doesn't really matter I think all these are
probably going to work very similarly let's start out with this and I'm not going to fill
this cavity up too big but let's let's see what happens boy this crushes so easily this is very
brittle stuff you can start to see it it only takes a few seconds and really all the kernels
are already broken you ever tried to do this with real corn you'd know that you'd be pounded on this
thing forever to get this to break up so this is makes it so much easier. I didn't notice it before
while I was actually making the parched corn but as soon as you start to break it up you get this
terrific smell this stuff it smells wonderful. Soon as you've got some of it broken down the
the real fine stuff is starting to get in the way so I can actually pour it into our sieve
here and then shake out the fine stuff and then put the grit right back in. I'm going to go ahead
and mix up the Indian corn I did earlier along with the yellow corn because they look almost
exactly the same once their parched I don't think they're going to have a lot of different flavor
I'm going to go ahead and keep this hominy separated to see if it has a different flavor
but we're going to grind it up the same way we did the other. Here are the two bowls we've got
the this is the hominy corn or the actual dried hominy that's pounded up after it was toasted,
baked, parched and here's the standard corn both the Indian corn and the yellow corn mixed up and
of course I've got the grits here left over now we're not going to actually cook these grits but
they would have been prepared by boiling them in water for 2-3 hours maybe even four hours to make
a special dish. We're not going to we don't have time to do that today maybe we'll do that in a
future episode but what do we got here with this a powdered meal would have been eaten in three
or four different ways possibly more but we've got some very simple ways. This would have been
taken on the trail and eaten basically put this in a leather bag take it along with you this is
all you've got to eat you'd mix this with water and we can do that we can without even cooking
it take a quantity of this meal we're going to put it in a little bowl here and mix it up with
an equal quantity of water possibly if we're on the trail and we don't want to even start a
fire we can prepare in this manner and eat it and it might not be the tastiest thing in the
world but it is sustenance if we have to keep moving and wow it looks very palatable doesn't
it kind of a cold mush. Now maybe we'd love to set a while to soak up it doesn't necessarily
say that so I guess we're going to try it out just just like this let's give it a try.
Hmm definitely an interesting flavor there's a lot of flavor here I mean if you just took
straight cornmeal you probably wouldn't think it tasted like anything. This in its in its essence
right here definitely gives you a flavorful feeling or sort of like eating solid coffee
or you know coffee grounds maybe but maybe I don't never eaten coffee grounds so it has to
be much worse than this but it's got a little bit of a burnt flavor but that also kind of
brings in a saltiness that you wouldn't expect out of something that is totally unseasoned at
all so it's actually got a lot of flavor to it even in this totally cold sense. Let's try
maybe baking it up a little bit see if we can make it a little bit more palatable. So let's
try cooking this up I'm going to add a little bit of water here to our pan and we're going
to use the hominy meal this time let's stir this up I don't want to overcook this it's
it seems to cook up pretty rapidly now if I really wanted this to break down I'd probably
cook this really really slowly maybe I'd take a little brass kettle and make a very porridge
out of it let's see how warm it is here yeah it's nice and warm. So I didn't necessarily
cook it up a lot I just wanted to try this out to see what happens when we get it warm
it did a little bit of cooking here you could see you don't want to heat this up too quick.
Yeah well again it's got a lot of flavor to it it's bringing a lot of that burnt flavor in so
you know depending on the kind of taste you want you might not want to take your parched
corn as far as I did many of the corn that I used in this kind of really blackened it
up if you like that kind of burnt popcorn taste then maybe this is the perfect thing for you I
can tell that it definitely would have a lot of flavor compared to some bland things again this
is completely unseasoned there's definitely a lot of flavor here maybe not something that
our modern palates are expecting. So not only can we eat this paste either a hot or cold but
there's another way we can actually eat this and that is as a drink and this is mentioned
in multiple different accounts and specifically the Iroquois had a drink called sagamite where
they would take this same sort of meal and add it to water where it's mostly water and
let that set like a tea possibly and then drink the water off of the top of that leaving the meal
behind maybe even straining it out. So I've let our sagamite where I'm they don't actually know
exactly what sagamite was like but I'm guessing here other drinks were exactly the same kind of
way let's let's test this out I've kind of let this steep for a little while like you would
let tea brew but just in room-temperature water let's find out what it tastes like.
Actually very nice slightly flavored water I'm sure that we could probably brew this in
a couple of different ways if we wanted to bring out more of the flavor but if you wanted to give
your water something a little extra maybe it didn't come from the cleanest source maybe it's
got an off taste to it this might be a good way to bring some flavor into it and maybe push down
the flavors you don't like so much but there's a lot of different things you can do with this.
One of the last ways at least we're going to try in this episode is a simple ash cake we can take
our meal mix it up with a little water into a paste and cook it right on the coals just like
we've done ash cakes before if you're interested in more on ash cakes and different ways of making
them make sure to check back I'll put a link down in the description section that points to
our other ash cake episodes or at least episode. Okay here's our ash cake it's all cooked up and
still got some little coals stuck to it and just brush that off a little charred around
the edges we can just break that off and makes into a nice little bread sort of like cornbread
again this is completely unflavored with anything no salt no nothing it's got a nice texture to it
got that same kind of flavor maybe not quite so strong actually makes a really good ash
cake depending on how you cook your parched corn. Excellent excellent way to cook it so there's so
many different methods that you can prepare this parched corn and eat it even in this meal form.
So these have been two pretty intense episodes a lot of information we did you know we parched the
corn and then we grounded we tried different types of cooking methods different types of
corns and then different kinds of ways to cook it there's so much to learn about parched corn
and I'm only just skimming the surface there's more to learn you know it's one thing to read it
in the book it's another to actually try it out we learn so much more when we try these things
out rather than just just reading it right I love this I want to thank you for coming
along as we try these things out as we savor the flavors in the aromas of the 18th century.