I was watching a BBC show tonight about farming in Britain - they kept referring to this corn field that was wheat, or looked like a wheat cereal grain. They ground some up and made bread from it - but still kept calling it corn.
This comes as a complete surprise to me, just how far behind the normal curve am I on this? Did I just fall off the turnip wagon and everyone else already knows that corn is wheat in Britain?
This could cause some recipe confusion with some of our cousins I suppose.
I have heard our corn sometimes called maize, but have never heard wheat called corn. Maybe a too sheltered life.
Historically the word corn was applied to the the small hard grain or fruit of a plant. It was used generically to refer to the leading crop of the district. In England, corn was wheat; in Scotland, oats; in the U.S., corn/maize.
"Korn" means any grain in Hochdeutsch (high German).
Here's the etymology:
"grain," Old English corn, from Proto-Germanic *kurnam "small seed," from Proto-Indo-European base *ger- "wear away" (Old Slavic - zruno "grain," Sanskrit jr- "to wear down," Latin - granum, Lithuanian - grudai). The sense of the Old English word was "grain with the seed still in" rather than a particular plant. Locally understood to denote the leading crop of a district. Restricted to corn on the cob in America (originally Indian corn, but the adjective was dropped), usually wheat in England, oats in Scotland and Ireland, while korn means "rye" in parts of Germany.
Butch50 wrote:just how far behind the normal curve am I on this? Did I just fall off the turnip wagon and everyone else already knows that corn is wheat in Britain?
It probably would have done my head in to Butch.
It is most absurdly said, in popular language, of any man, that he is disguised in liquor; for, on the contrary, most men are disguised by sobriety. ~Thomas de Quincy, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, 1856
That got me to thinking about corned beef, so I looked it up.
The name "corned beef" arose in the 1600s. "Corn" comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for granule or pellet, referring to the grains of salt used to make the brine in which the beef soaked. Europeans used the word "corn" to mean any common grain. When they came to the New World, the commonest grain was the maize the natives grew. Europeans called it "Indian corn" and later just "corn."
Theres probably someone out there with wheat flavored UJSM.Boy will they be suprized when they make some with maize.Thats the great thing about that recipe,It always turns out good.Ive used combonations of grains in it many times,and it always picks up flavor from whatever you throw in the fermenter.
I always think of the blue/purple corn grown in the SW and Mexico/Central America when I hear Indian corn.
I don't know what strain was growing on the east coast in the 1700's but if the early settlers named what we now call regular yellow/white maize "Indian Corn", that might clear up some of the controversy about George Washington's recipe thats been going on.
Fire is the devil’s only friend - Don McLean
Jump in where you can and hang on - Brisco Darling
"The word corn can be traced to an Indoeuropean word that was translated to mean ‘small nugget.’ The various transmutations of this origin evolved into the Germanic ‘korn’ which means any cereal grain, and the Latin ‘granum’ (grain) which also refers to any edible grass seed. When English and German settlers arrived in the new world they referred to the crop as "corn" referring to their generic term for an edible grass crop. They distinguished it from other grains by calling it "Indian corn." The origin of the word maize is believed to be from Taino people, who inhabited the islands in Northern Antilles (near present day San Salvador) where Christopher Columbus first landed. The Taino name for their crop was actually "mahis" which meant "source of life." Over time the word has been transmutated phonetically into maize."
