What Country Does Popcorn Come From?
Popcorn probably was first discovered in Mexico, where it was used for cooking and decorative purposes. Historical evidence also traces it back thousands of years to regions which now are the southwestern United States.
Geography
Popcorn most likely originated in Mexico. The oldest ears discovered to date were found in a New Mexico cave in 1948, and carbon dating shows they are over 4,000 years old. Popcorn also has been traced to the Cachise Indians of southwestern Arizona, dating back to 2500 B.C. Popcorn kernels have been found in Peruvian tombs as well, dating to over 1,000 years old.
A 1,000 year-old-kernel of popcorn has been found in a southwestern Utah cave, where predecessors of the Pueblo Indians once lived.
Function
Hernando Cortes in 1519 found the Aztec population of Mexico using popcorn for food and for decorating their necklaces and ceremonial clothing. Franciscan priest Bernardino de Sahagun in the 1500s described it as a kind of corn which bursts when heated and looks like a white flower.
Records by European explorers and settlers indicate that popcorn use had spread to all the Native American tribes by the 1600s. Christopher Columbus in 1492 found the native population in the West Indies using popcorn for food and for decoration, and French explorers in the early 1600s noted that the Iroquois of the Great Lakes Region cooked popcorn in pottery with sunflower oil. In 1615, the first known white visitor to New York's Chemung Valley reported eating something delicious which likely was popcorn mixed with maple syrup.
Features
Historically, Native Americans cooked popcorn by piercing the cob with a sharp stick, covering the corn with oil, and then laying the cob near a fire. In this method, when the corn popped, it would stay attached to the ear. Popcorn also was made by cooking it on hot stones, or by mixing it with hot sand.
Time Frame
Nowadays, most of the world's popcorn crop is grown in Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska and Ohio. It was the late 1800s before popcorn began to be grown commercially and not just by individual farmers and gardeners. The widespread popularity of popcorn got a big boost from the Chicago firm of C. Cretors & Company, who built the first mobile popcorn machine and introduced it in 1893.
Misconceptions
Scholars believe that the word "corn" used in the Bible and in ancient Egyptian references actually refers to barley. At the time, the word "corn" was a general term used to designate the most-used grain of a specific region.
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