Foreign corn and Turkish wheat
Maize – we know it as popcorn, which we can buy at the fair or the cinema, or as crunchy cornflakes for breakfast. Apart from that, Central Europeans consider it a somewhat inferior cereal, really only good enough for cattle feed. In Central Europe maize has not become widely established as a food crop.
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When Columbus discovered Cuba and Haiti in 1492 and wrongly believed himself to be in the West Indies, the spies he sent out returned with news of the cultivation of a strange plant, which the indigenous people called maize or mahiz. A short time later the first maize seeds arrived in Spain on a homecoming ship. |
The Spanish were clearly very quick to recognise the value of this plant as a food crop, because by 1525, whilst the conquest of Mexico and Peru was still in full swing, they were already growing maize in the fields of Andalusia. The new plant was incredibly adaptable, grew quickly and produced high yields, which was a blessing for the impoverished and starving peasants in Spain and Northern Italy soon after, where they grew the maize in their gardens. Maize spread rapidly via Italy to the Balkans, then on Portuguese ships to South East Asia, India, China and Japan. It seems likely that the Portuguese traders also brought maize to Africa, only to ship it back to America a short time later with African slaves.
Maize only reached Central Europe after a detour via the Middle East, and because people didn’t know or had forgotten where it originally came from, it became known as "Turkish corn" or "Turkish wheat". The Turks themselves called it "Egyptian corn" and the Egyptians called it "Syrian sorghum". The German naturalist Hieronymus Bock, who referred to maize in his "New Kreuterbuch" herbal in 1542, simply called it "foreign corn".
How the Indians grew maize
At the time of the Spanish conquest, at least 200 different varieties of cultivated maize with astonishingly high grain yields could be found in its homeland. Even today, the ancient Maya strains are still producing maize in a great variety of colours ranging from yellow-orange, via red and blue right through to black.
The Indian farmers were deeply committed to maintaining this diversity. The grains from the best cobs were used as seed. Apart from this, they did not select the seeds to be sown and the different maize varieties were deliberately planted in mixed crops. Although they risked yield losses by doing so, they gave their crops a broad genetic base, which protected them from pests and diseases.
Normally they grew the maize in conjunction with beans and squashes. This is still practised in Latin America today. The beans could scramble up the firm, tall stalks of maize and the squashes spread along the ground and kept the weeds down. The Indians divided the land into fields like a chessboard and in the middle of each field they piled up mounds of earth. The women then poked holes into these mounds and threw in maize, bean and squash seeds. Coastal dwellers also threw in fish. They had discovered that maize likes to be well fertilised.
A mystery illness and the wisdom of the Indian people
Since the late 17th century a mystery illness had been rife among the poor of Southern Europe. It began with skin rashes, followed by diarrhoea and vomiting, disruption to the central nervous system and finally death. Nobody knew that this was a disease called pellagra and even in the 19th century the scientific world believed the symptoms were caused by a lack of animal protein. It was not until the beginning of the 20th century that the cause of pellagra was found to be an almost exclusive diet of maize. Maize is low in the essential amino acids lysine and tryptophan. Lysine is important for bone growth and tryptophan is a precursor of niacin, which in turn releases essential vitamin B. The first successful treatments for pellagra consisted of administering brewer’s yeast, which contains sufficient quantities of vitamin B.
Interestingly, this disease did not exist in the birthplace of maize, not even when the Spanish conquistadors forced the Indians to grow maize exclusively and destroyed their gardens. Today this puzzle has been solved: ancient knowledge about the right way to prepare maize did not cross the Atlantic along with the maize. In Europe the dry grains were ground, but the Indians softened the whole grains first, cooked them and then ground them. But their secret ingredient was ash, which they added to soften the husks and make the grains more digestible. By adding ash, in other words lime, the niacin in the maize is liberated and can take effect.
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