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By Root 2739 0

Corn will grow almost anywhere, and by 1620 was a well-established crop throughout the New World. To the original colonists, ‘corn’ signified any common grain, as it still does in Britain. So they adopted the Spanish name maize (after a West Indian Taino word, mahiz). Since maize was in effect the only type of grain there was, ‘corn’ gradually came to signify it alone. Corn has been domesticated for so long – some seven thousand years – that it is now totally dependent on humankind for its continued existence. Left on its own, the kernels of each cob – its seeds – would be strangled by the husk. Even in colonial times it was a far more demanding plant than the colonists were used to. With their usual vexing ineptitude the first colonists tried sowing it by broadcast method, as they did with other grains, and were baffled that it didn’t grow. It took the natives to show them that corn flourished only when each seed was planted in a mound and helped along with a little fish-meal fertilizer.

By the early seventeenth century, many New World foods were already known in Europe, though not necessarily to the early English colonists. The first Pilgrims may have heard of, but almost certainly had never tasted, two New World foods: the tomato and white potato. Nor did they get the opportunity in their new-found land since these plants were unknown to the eastern seaboard. The Indians of the east coast did, however, have the sweet potato, and for almost two centuries when Americans talked of potatoes that was what they meant.

The white potato had reached England, via Spain, in the sixteenth century but suffered a crippling setback when the queen’s cook, with that knack for culinary misapprehension with which the English have long distinguished themselves, discarded the tubers and cooked the leaves. For well over a century, the white potato was grown strictly as an ornamental plant until Europeans at last began to appreciate its manifold possibilities as a foodstuff. The Irish developed a particular attachment to it, not so much because of its agreeable versatility as because it was one of the few plants that would prosper on Irish soil. Elsewhere in the British Isles it remained largely unknown. It made its first recorded appearance in the American colonies in 1719, in Boston, though it was not until a gentleman farmer in Virginia named Thomas Jefferson tried cultivating the white potato – which he called the Irish potato – that it began to attract any attention in America as a potential food. Jefferson also appears to have been the first American to serve French fried potatoes – rather a daring thing to do since it was generally accepted that the tubers were toxic and that the only way to avoid a long and agonizing death was to boil them mercilessly. Until well into the 1800s almost no one dared to eat them any other way. It appears that the whole of Europe’s potato output at this time came from just two plants brought back by the Spanish; this lack of genetic diversity is very probably what led to Ireland’s devastating potato blight in the nineteenth century, with obvious consequences for American immigration. The word spud, incidentally, comes from the kind of spade with which potatoes were dug out. Though the word itself dates from the Middle Ages, it became associated with potatoes only in the 1840s.

The history of the tomato (from tomatl, like so many other food words a Nahuatl term) in the New World is strikingly similar to that of the potato. It was carried to Europe from South America by the Spanish, widely regarded as poisonous, treated for two centuries as a decorative curiosity, and finally rescued from obscurity by the ever industrious Thomas Jefferson, who made the first recorded mention of it in North America in 1781. He referred to it as the tomata. Until well into the nineteenth century it was regarded as dangerously exotic on its native soil, though a degree of caution is understandable since the tomato is after all a member of the nightshade family.

The colonists were, however, well acquainted with a New World