On Wheat and on Corn

I ran the Walnut Schoolhouse in the land of corn. Most all of the Americas were the land of corn before European arrival, but few places in the United States have held onto this legacy as strongly as Appalachia. I moved there from the Pacific Northwest, where corn could be found in 2016 as cornmeal, popcorn, or dried masa. In Western North Carolina I found Bloody Butcher Corn, tinted red and tasting of Cream of Wheat; I learned about the stunning blue Cherokee White Eagle variety, a remnant of vibrant indigenous traditions in the are; I tried the resilient Tuxapeno, which makes a luscious pot of grits without the need for a heavy glug of cream. Corn grew in abundance here, visible in fields around my neighborhood. And yet, I was running a baking school centered around wheat. 

Wheat’s prominence in the South, and especially in Appalachia, is in fact recent. The growing conditions often determine the final product: the cold conditions of America’s Northeast and Midwest produced strong, high-protein grains, while the hot and humid conditions of the South produced softer wheats. Wheat in the South, then, was used far more often for tender biscuits and soft sandwich loaves, while northern wheats were turned into heartier loaves of bread, bagels, and more. 

And so corn remained a dominant grain in Appalachia, whose combination of swampy summer conditions and steep slopes made it difficult to plant fields of the amber waves of grain growing elsewhere in the country. Baking with wheat only gained more popularity when women from the North moved down to the area with the misguided idea of refining a culture they found backwards and behind-the-times, trying to teach Appalachian people how to make biscuits and breads instead of their typical cornbreads. Wheat, in its whiteness and refinement, signified purity, whereas corn signified a rougher, coarser culture. 

  Wheat may seem ubiquitous now, but at one point it was a novelty even in Europe. Wheat pushed further and further west along with European expansion, and, in the process, European imperialism. Replacing biodiverse stretches of forest and prairie in the Americas with monocropped fields of wheat was every bit as important, and perfectly aligned with, the religious and cultural angles of Western influence in the Americas. Complex systems of crop rotation and foraging faded, as did ancient food traditions like the nixtamalization of corn (that which transforms maize into masa, and makes it far more nutritionally available for the body) and the making of nut flours towards simpler foods–nutritionally speaking, at least–like fry bread, wheat tortillas, and more.

But such an analysis risks minimizing the resourcefulness of communities in the Americas dealing with this foreign grain. It’s remarkable how cultures across the globe, European ones included, have taken this small grain and developed countless new foods, offering new and lasting sustenance for their communities. In the Carolinas, wheat has gained more of a foothold in the region as different types of wheat and rye and more were tested out, some proving more capable of making stronger flours. Today, varieties like Turkey Red Wheat and NuEast Hard Red grow in the region and produce beautiful breads, and farmers, millers, and bakers across the region have cultivated one of the most vibrant local grain economies in the region. Healthy whole-grain and naturally fermented breads abound here now. It’s not that wheat and its many baked iterations are unhealthy; rather, it’s that the ubiquity of wheat around the Americas has, on the whole, reduced the complexity of broader systems of environmental and nutritional health.

Appalachia, for one, has held an increasing prominence in the food-focused American mind precisely because wheat couldn’t take over the rugged mountain landscapes like it could in other parts of the country. While wheat was incorporated into diets here in innovative ways like apple stack cakes and tomato gravies, it could never be the centerpiece. Rather, a distinctly Appalachian blend of indigenous (often, from the Cherokee peoples), Scots-Irish, and African foodways has kept older traditions alive and well: the annual sorghum syrup boil, the predominance of corn-based foods, and the folkways of foraging and herbal medicine.

Personally, as I’ve been grappling with my own developing gluten-allergy, I’ve been gravitating more towards naturally-gluten free baked goods. Cultures across the world, I began to realize, have cultivated cuisines around corn, rice, and more, because wheat either grew poorly there or was too expensive or for a variety of other reasons. A wide array of baked goods were designed to be gluten-free simply because that was the path of least resistance at the time, or because alternative flours like buckwheat and almond produced a flavor or texture that worked better for the product. 

Some, like corn tortillas or tamales in Mexico, or tapioca cakes in the Philippines, or Mochi in Japan, exist largely outside of the sphere of European influence. While I’m fascinated by these foods, however, they are not my traditions to share. Rather, I will highlight baked goods like a buckwheat cake from Northern Italy, almond-based cookies from Italy, and rice pudding from Sweden, tracing along the way the arrival of these grains and nuts into Europe and how they were adopted into the cuisine.

Keep an eye out for some of these recipes to be posted on the website blog, and many more to be compiled into a virtual cookbook.