The author of a pamphlet, A Short Story about Indian Corn Meal, published in the 1850s waxes eloquent about the taste and texture of local corn.
“... Indian corn raised on the southern coast of Rhode Island, along the fabled Atlantic, where alone the soft, balmy breezes from the Gulf Stream ever fan the celestial plant in its growth, and impart to the grain that genial softness, that tempting fragrance and delicious flavor that cause the Greeks of old to bestow upon Narragansett corn meal the name of Ambrosia, imagining it to be a food originally designed and set apart by the gods exclusively for their own use.”
I’m startled! I always thought that the concept of specific geographic place affecting the taste of food was a thoroughly modern idea.
Oddly, the English language still has no one word to describe how a particular location may influence the taste of an agricultural product. The French describe the idea as terroir : a concept that one locality with its unique combination of soil, weather, water and production methods yields a crop that is qualitatively different from the same product created on a different site. In other words, if you switch a plant’s geographic position and growing conditions, you change its taste.
Wines enthusiasts embrace the differences between a “Chalk Hill Chardonnay” produced from grapes grown on limestone hillsides south of Healdsburg, California, and a “Saltwater Farm Chardonnay” produced from grapes trellised in fields bordering Wequetequock Cove, a tidal estuary in Stonington. While modern Americans may accept the concept of “somewhereness” as important when it applies to high-priced wines, are we willing to use the same principle that “place makes a difference” when we discuss more mundane crops such as corn, tomatoes, and potatoes?
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