We've got a very special episode for you today it's very experimental we're going to be working
on parched corn and a very very important part of living life in the 18th century and even the
17th century thanks for joining us today on this episode. Corn was such an important food for the
Native Americans and these settlers in the 17th, 18th, 19th century that we really have to spend a
lot of time on it. It is a very very interesting topic and corn was prepared and used in so many
different ways sometimes when it was green when it first came up or when it wasn't fully mature
and then when it was ripe and then dried. Well today we're going to be focusing on parched corn
and this particular kind of preparation was so important for long journeys and for storing this
food for winter to be used at different times of the year so this is going to be a lot of
fun. There are a number of different descriptions about how parched corn is prepared and a number
of different kinds of corns that we are going to be using today and one of the reasons for
this diversity is because this product was made over a long period of time by a lot of
different kinds of people so you can imagine there are many different ways to do it that's
what we're going to have fun with experimenting with all these different kinds of corn and all
these different kinds of preparation methods. I've got some small kerneled popcorn the popcorn
is actually very similar to 18th century corn in that it is a flint corn and many of the kinds of
corns that they had there in the 17th and 19th century Native Americans they had a very small
kernel corn was actually sought after. I've got a little bit of this is a hominy corn actually not
made into hominy yet but made to be turned into hominy it looks like a bit of a dent corn it's
just a yellow corn looks very interesting. I've got some hominy here some dried hominy that's
going to do some very interesting things. And I've got just some straight Indian corn it's a mix of
colors it looks like a flint corn it doesn't have any dent in it that should work well too. Lots of
different corns lots of things to experiment with. Let's get started right now you know the
first method I'm going to try out here it is very very simple it kind of reminds me of how we did
the roasting the coffee over the open fire I've got a little frying pan here I'm just going to
start off with my just straight Indian corn and I'm going to toss it in the frying pan it's kind
of been pre warmed up this method really is the most obvious one but you definitely have to have
a certain kind of pan to do it with this also is only going to work obviously with some kinds of
corn. So as this starts to warm up and starts to get heated you want to keep this moving in the pan
and you can start to hear the kernels popping. Now this isn't like real popcorn if it was real
popcorn to be blowing out of the pan and that's why for this particular method I'm not going to
bother to use the the actual real popcorn because it would be flying everywhere. But that was one of
the things that happened in the 18th century and one of the reasons while why we will talk about
other methods here in a little bit. Okay most of the kind of popping is done here and I for now
at least I'm going to call this batch done you can see some of it popped like we would expect
popcorn to pop most of it did not pop which is fine that's going to work out it's going to be
good too. I'm now next up here and I'm going to be using some of this dried hominy corn pour a batch
of this in. Hominy is another method of preparing a corn for later use or use at the time this is
corn that's soaked in lye and soaked for a long period of time this releases the outer husk of
the corn and it also does some other things to it making it give it a different taste and a
different texture. Very good for sort of long-term storage also. Okay I've got the hominy corn out in
fact maybe it got just a little more brown but hey this is an experiment we're not sure how anything
is going to turn out perfectly. I've got some of this yellow corn to dent corn and we'll put that
in some references I've read have talked about pem.. or have talked about parched corn being
basically popcorn and kind of referring to it as if it popped open a lot I doubt that was true most
of the time it's hard to say what the moisture content was in any particular person's corn so
some they might have gotten to a popcorn stage and it popped open rather vigorously and other times
possibly it didn't hardly do anything but just basically crack open. So you might be wondering
so what is the point of doing parched corn? Sell there's a lot more to it than just simply
toasting it we're actually driving out any excess moisture and another thing that's happening is is
that we're turning a super hard kernel into something that's much more easily ground up
or pounded up with a mortar and pestle it's also changing the flavors of it we're changing some of
these starches to sugars and this toasting action is going to give it a completely different flavor
than you would expect from just mere cornmeal so there's a many different kinds of things happening
and as we take our parched corn and we grind it up we're going to we're actually going to be taking
it and putting it into a much more compact form at the same time. This in turn creates a the perfect
food the perfect survival for food if you will because it has almost complete nutrition or at
least let's say it's nutritious has a lot of energy and packed in for the amount of weight
that you get and it's not in a and it's not in a big bulky form either. So here's where the real
experimenting comes in there's another method for preparing parched corn that when I first read it I
think okay this isn't going to work right but here let me read to you this is a piece out of Benjamin
Franklin's piece on he had a pamphlet basically on maize right so here's what he talks about he says
"an iron pot is filled with sand and said on the fire till the sand is very hot two or three pounds
of grain are then thrown in and well mixed with the sand by stirring each grain bursts and throws
out a white substance twice its bigness the sand is separated by a wire sieve and returned into the
pot to be heated again and repeat the operation with fresh grain" now I don't know about you but
I if it's like real popcorn you would think all that sand would get mixed in with a popcorn and
the last thing I want to be doing is eating sand but we're going to try out this method anyway
let's get working on this sand pot. So as odd as this method may sound it starts to make sense when
you understand what happens when you don't have a lot of materials or a lot of tools to use this
method undoubtedly was used pre-european contact by the Native Americans when the only vessels they
had were simple clay pots that they fashioned themselves this heats the kernels all the way
around all at once. So there's another variation of this pot method instead of sand inside of the
cast-iron pot or the clay pot you can use salt and of course having salt inside of my popcorn
that doesn't get loose after you shake it that sounds a lot more palatable than sand in there
again this is in Benjamin Franklin's a little maize pamphlet he says "the sand is separated
by a wire sieve and returned into the pot to be heated again and repeat the operation with
fresh grain" so of course Native Americans may not have had a wire sieve he talks about using
this wire sieve but here we're using a basket one of our potato baskets to use as the sieve portion
if we were doing it the other method we could try to get all the sand kernels off and in this case
all the salt kernels off of our corn although I wouldn't mind leaving a little bit. And here's
our final preparation method this one's probably the strangest one of all probably the most I don't
know experimental we'll see how it turns out what we're going to do is now that I've had the fire
going for quite a while while I'm going to spread out my layer of embers and I'm just going to pour
the corn right onto the embers and we'll see what happens I have not tried this method before so
it's really an experiment. This is basically the only method if you don't have any utensils with
you at all you don't have any pots if you don't have any pans and still you want to cook up this
corn to make it so that you can eat it some way this is going to be the method you use there we
go here we go this is our pan I haven't got it all separated yet but I've scooped out some of
the kernels here and you can see a nice popped kernels are still hot the embers are still in
here and separating them that's going to be the hard part with this we might be able to use a
basket when this is completely cooled off more than likely we just sort of spread this out on
the ground and you know get the embers away and pick out the little corn kernel pieces maybe you
would do this on the fire and you'd put the embers down and you'd put the corn on and then you would
smother the fire. I'm not sure I've only read a couple of instances of this it isn't a method as
as well-documented as the other ones but it certainly looks interesting I'm not sure if
I want to you know work too hard at picking all these out it does have another addition a good
thing though that comes with it that is the ashes that gets stuck to the corn are actually good for
you when mixed with the corn they release more nutrients and so this is actually one of the
probably the most nutritious ways that we could fix this if we could separate out you know all
the charcoal and everything else. Well there you go we have parched multiple different kinds of
corn using multiple different kinds of methods and they each well they were all very interesting the
real question now is how do we prepare this so that we can eat it how do we make it palatable
and what does it taste like that's next week's episode we're going to have a lot of fun with
that so make sure to tune back in next week when we figure out how to make this into something we
can eat. I want to thank you for coming along with us as we experiment as we try these things
out how we can how do we rediscover what happened 2-300 years ago with corn this is so much fun I
want to thank you for coming along as we savor the flavors in the aromas of the 18th century.