Salted Corn

Corn originally comes from Central America, where the indigenous inhabitants bred the crop into larger, more nutritious cobs. Time and again they picked the best, tastiest and largest cobs to propagate the corn. They probably started out with teosinte, a small grass plant. Columbus, who ‘discovered’ America in 1492, took the corn plant to Spain, where the crop thrived straight away. The Europeans then bred the corn further for the colder climate, after which the plant also did better and better in colder regions.

Corn or maize (Zea mays subsp. mays) is a cereal from Central America and belongs to the grass family. Corn is a direct domestication of teosinte, Zea mays ssp. parviglumis. In corn, the female and male flowers are separate, but on the same plant. The male flowers sit in the tassel at the top of the plant. About halfway up the plant, in the leaf axils, are one or more cobs made up of the female flowers.

Corn is pollinated by the wind. In the past, the varieties were so-called open-pollinated varieties. Today almost all corn varieties are hybrids. Corn belongs to the monocotyledons, or monocots. The food reserve of the corn kernel is therefore stored in the endosperm. A distinction is made between dent and flint corn. The dent kernel can be recognised by the small dent in the top of the kernel.