How did the Indians "pop" corn?

One of the characteristic American foods is popcorn--a treat made by heating kernels of certain species of maize, which quickly release their stored water and turn into white, fluffy, and tasty inside-out morsels.  We're told that American Indians treated the early settlers from England to popcorn and showed them how to make it.

But how did they make it?  I didn't start to think about that until I saw the Townsend video to the left of this post.  

I thought about the different ways I've made popcorn.  

Most of the ways I've used to pop corn involved heating popcorn in oil inside a covered pot.  The very first popcorn I made was "Jiffy Pop"--sealed popcorn inside a tinfoil pieplate with a wire handle attached.  One shook this tin plate periodically while heating it over a stove burner (it had a wire handle attached).  Today's Jiffy Pop uses partially hydrogenated soybean oil, and maybe the original did as well, for all I know. "TVTime" popcorn gave you a tube containing a combination of solidified palm oil and (I think) coconut oil that could be dumped into one's own pot to heat.  Microwave popcorn works on the same principle, except the corn and solidified oils are placed inside the microwave inside a sealed paper bag.  Later I found, by experiment, that heating popcorn in just enough olive oil to cover the bottom of the pot works well too, and gives a more pleasant flavor to the finished product.  Electrical hot air poppers were invented in the 1970s, but did not become as widespread as one might expect, possibly due to the greater convenience of microwave popcorn.

But the American Indians didn't have electric hot air poppers.  They also didn't have soybean oil, coconut oil, palm oil, or olive oil--none of those plants originated in the New World.  I don't know whether they had butter, but even if they did, using too much melted butter on popcorn--let alone popping the corn in it--tends to make the final product soggy.

So what did they use?  Animal fat is a possibility, I suppose, though wild game--which is what the American Indians ate when they ate meat--isn't particularly rich in fat.

The Townsend video above suggests, and demonstrates, a plausible answer, which it credits to a pamphlet published by, of all people, Benjamin Franklin.

According to Ben, popcorn can be made by heating the corn in a dry kettle filled with clean sand or salt!  First you heat the kettle with the sand or salt in it.  When the sand or salt is hot enough, you stir the popcorn into it, continuing the stirring until the corn is mostly covered by the sand/salt.  Continue heating the filled kettle.  The heat in the sand or salt will transmit itself to the corn, popping it.  When you judge the popping process to be done (judging in part by how many kernels pop through to the surface), you remove the pot from the heat, filter out the sand (or salt) with a fine-mesh metal sieve or, failing that, a wide-mouthed basket.

The advantage of this method is that you don't need a lid to confine the corn--the sand or salt works well for that.  And if you use salt, it's not a problem if some of it sticks to the finished product (unless you're watching your sodium intake).
 
I enjoyed this tiny exercise in attempting to deduce how the first Americans might have made popcorn.  It's a good illustration of how one has to consider technologies that would have been available to a culture for cooking in attempting to deduce how foods were made.  

Food Book Presents

This Christmas, I received two interesting, quasi-historical books about food.

Solley, Patricia.  An Exaltation of Soups:  the Soul-Satisfying Story of Soup, As Told in More Than 100 Recipes.  Three Rivers Press, 2004.

Smith, Andrew F.  Popped Culture:  A Social History of Popcorn in America.  University of South Carolina Press, 1999.

By now, I have dipped into both books enough to be able to provide mini-reviews of them (despite the bout of flu, or food poisoning, that I contracted over Christmas weekend).

Patricia Solley is the woman responsible for soupsong.com, a site about soups of all kinds from all lands.  The book is a lot like the site.  It is full of good recipes and amusing cultural and historic trivia.  Although many of the recipes strike me as too difficult to make or too strange to eat, I've made a list of six or eight foreign soups I must try, including spiced plum soup (a Polish dish), salted lamb and pea soup (Icelandic) and iced cucumber soup (Bulgarian).  Some of the soups I'm interested in making will finally, after years of avoidance, require me to obtain either a blender or a food processor.  Naturally, I will write about any of my soupy experiments here.

Mr. Smith's book is more perplexing.  He announces that it was his intent to write a serious history of popcorn, and he bemoans at some length the dearth of serious, well-researched books about culinary history.  Despite that fact, Popped Culture consists largely, though not solely, of a collection of trivia and anecdotes about how popcorn was popularized, made, and eaten in America.  This may be because of the difficulty of collecting information about popcorn in "food histories" and Mr. Smith's concomitant need to search for evidence in indirect and unusual places (old cookbooks and newspaper articles, for example).  But part of the problem is that Mr. Smith chose to organize his book by topic instead of chronologically--though a chronological organization might have suited his stated purpose--a history of popcorn and its impact on American culture--better.

On the other hand, some of Mr. Smith's trivia are very interesting indeed.  His description of the archaeological investigations that led to evidence that certain Mesoamerican Indians did, in fact, make popcorn is fascinating, as is his description of the many ways in which popcorn was popped in nineteenth century America and the devices invented to make the process simpler and culinarily more appealing (by limiting the smoky flavor).  And Mr. Smith's book, like Ms. Solley's book, contains a number of recipes that use popcorn (including, to my surprise, pudding recipes and stuffing recipes).

So although these books do not provide the kind of historical information that interests me most, they promise plenty of fun, as well as good eating.