Corny

Following my success a few weeks ago with corn bread, I’ve made some more to go with a chilli. Sweetcorn, cornflour, polenta… they are so often part of things we cook and things we eat, it’s sometimes easy to forget that like potatoes and tomatoes they didn’t arrive in Europe until they were brought back from the Americas.

The word corn however was used long before maize was introduced and described as corn, originally called Indian corn. Originally ‘corn’ just meant grain and could be applied to anything but was usually understood as wheat or oats. The actual word is Old English, meaning grain, and you can see the connexion with ‘korn’ in our cousin language Friesian and our grandparent language Saxon. There were other varieties of the seam word in kurnam, coren, kärna and kaurn. In that old sense it was the seed which was understood, not the actual plant, and it’s present in barleycorn, meaning the see to grow barley.

Corn as a grain crops up in one well-known meat product, corned beef! Here the preserving process for the beef used corns of salt, grains of salt, and it was corned or salted meat. I’ve had success with cornbread, I don’t think I’ll try making corned beef though!