As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.
I have often been puzzled about flint corn. It is hard as flint, and it never progressed to modern agriculture, and yet it was one of the corns grown with pop, sweet, flour and dent corn.
So I started searching just what this corn was really good for, as I found hints of it among the Hidatsa Indian of North Dakota, in they sort of boiled it.
The secret to flint is to make hominy corn of it, apparently. For those who do not know what hominy is, hominy is corn which has been soaked in lye or wood ash, which is lye. The process only has reason when you understand it apparently is used to loosen the corn hulls, and leaving just the starch or germ part.
I found a series of recipes for flint corn, and this one comes from the Creek Indians. This would be the powerful tribal group of the south Mississippi, just below the Cherokee groups, and which General Andrew Jackson defeated in some murderous campaigns of both Americans and Indians.
This recipe is called tuk like tokse in the Creek, and it means sour bread and takes 3 days to prepare. It starts off with a peck of shelled flint corn, soaked in warm water over night.
This corn is then pounded lightly in a mortar to loosen the hulls. It is then fanned to remove the hulls from the kernels.
This corn is then soaked another night.
Then the corn is pounded to a fine meal. Sift out the large bits, and boil down to a mush in being completely cooked.
The gruel is then mixed with the meal, and placed in a large jar, where it is kept in a warm place.
The next morning, this slightly fermented mush has added to it some salt and baking soda to be baked slowly in a dutch oven. The end product will be whiter than wheat flour bread, and be naturally sweet without sugar added.
The Cherokee and Creek also had a pumpkin bread, which used this same corn mush, with pumpkin meat added to it, to form a bread which was often eaten too.
Flint corn is a remarkable old corn type, in it has the genetics to grow like weeds and produce. I can understand it falling out of favor in it being a very coarse corn meal, and requiring a bit of wood ash treatment to get it to where it can be used. The reality is though, I find modern yellow corn meal, quite bitter at times, and gets old quickly when eaten as it is overtaxing the taste buds. I intend to try these new methods in trying these old flint corns, which I assume will have different flavors from the yellow dent.
There is a Finnish dish from Christmas called Memna or something, which is rye bread, which is another bitter bread, until it is allowed to break down in natural fermenting. I noticed in waiting a day for rye bread to raise and bake, that it does become naturally more sugary as the starches convert to sugar. I suspect the corn goes through this same process.
I want to find a use for these old squaw corns as they have value, if one understands how to utilize them. I intend to expand my seed banks with flint corn, and some of these flints in the eastern types were over 100 bushel an acre in production. It is why the Indians planted them and used them. They were hard as rocks and kept as long as rocks.........in a surprise this spring I planted some very old Dakota White which sprouted years after other corns would never have sprouted.
Flint bread is hopefully going to visit the Thanksgiving table this year.......and it probably is something which might be a crop to have on hand for your future use in a world gone tribulation.
agtG
