Recipes with corn

Maize is the one grain whose chemistry you have to know before you can cook it well. Left as it is, it locks up its vitamin B3 in a form the body cannot absorb; cooked in alkaline water, it releases it. That is nixtamalisation, invented in Mesoamerica thousands of years ago, and it splits the world's corn cooking into two families.

On one side, the kitchens that received the technique along with the grain: Mexican tamales and pozole rojo, Venezuelan and Colombian arepas all work a dough of treated corn that holds together and smells of something other than the raw grain. On the other, those that adopted the plant without the technique and reinvented it their own way: Romanian mămăligă and Ukrainian banosh make a firm porridge of it, while the American South turned it into cornbread and breakfast grits.

Elsewhere it is simply eaten as a kernel: Kenyan githeri simmers it with beans, as does North American succotash, and Andean humita and Costa Rican chorreadas grate the fresh cob before it dries. For those last two, supermarket sweetcorn is not really a substitute for starchy field corn: expect a sweeter, looser result.