Corn or maize was domesticated and cultivated in two primary areas, one to the north of the Equator, which included Mexico, Central America, Colombia and Venezuela, and the second to the south and including Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Brazil.

The corn plant was already being extensively grown in all of its existing varieties by the native peoples of the New World when Christopher Columbus first reached its shores. The cultivation of corn was of primary importance to the daily diet of the Indians, who used it primarily in making a sort of bread, the tortilla, the production of which was assigned to women.

The Spanish subsequently encountered corn as they penetrated virtually every part of Central America and especially Mexico, where it was made into tortillas, flavored with meat sauce and honey, that were sold under the porticoes surrounding the square in which the market has held in the capital. In addition, Francisco Pizarro found corn growing throughout Peru, where the Indians also used it in various ways, grinding dried kernels or boiling and roasting whole ears.


Columbus took the seeds back to Spain at the conclusion of his first voyage in 1493. However, it required many decades for the plant to become widely diffused in Europe.

The cultivation of corn was initiated in Europe only around 1520, when several varieties were introduced from Mexico. The plant was initially grown in Andalusia but then spread to Galicia and Catalonia before being introduced into southwestern France. The plant was soon known throughout the Mediterranean Basin, spreading as far as the Balkans and, with the growth of trade, even farther, to the whole of Africa and Asia. Corn adapted rapidly to the European environment because of the ease with which it spontaneously develops hybrids and because of its pronounced genetic variability.

The cereal was being cultivated in Portugal almost as soon as it was in Spain, which tended to support the hypothesis that Columbus gave the Portuguese some of the seeds collected on his first voyage. The mariner had been forced by severe storms to put into a Portuguese port rather than Palos in Spain, his intended destination, and he was formally welcomed to the country by King John II.

In other parts of Europe, cultivation of corn was taken up at an extremely slow pace. It was regarded primarily as a garden plant and, while it was of interest to and studied by botanists, it was virtually unknown to farmers. In France, corn was beginning to appear in French gardens but only for ornamental purposes, while various Dutch and German botanists spoke of the cultivation of the cereal in Central Europe and in England but, again, as a decorative plant rather than as a food source.

Corn was rapidly diffused in Africa and Asia, being introduced to both continents most probably by the Portuguese through their colonies and trading posts. They certainly planted corn in Brazil, which they colonized. It soon became an important crop in Portuguese Guinea.

In Italy, corn was introduced into the region of the Veneto around 1530. It proved to be highly successful in the region and by the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th it was also being grown in the Friuli region and the delta of the Po River.


However, corn also reached Naples, a viceregal possession of Spain in that period, at an early date. Cultivation of the cereal may have initiated the region’s role as a leading experimenter with the “new things” brought to Europe from the New World.

It is probable that the polenta pasticciata (baked layered cornmeal mush, meat sauce, butter or oil and cheese) of Naples was created earlier than the polenta cunscia (boiled mush enriched with garlic and butter) of Lombardy or at least contemporaneously with the pasticcio di polenta (cornmeal tart filled with pigeon, veal or chicken, cooked ham, Parmesan cheese and dried mushrooms) and polenta e osei (small birds served atop cornmeal mush) of the Veneto.

 Although the south was already strongly oriented toward hard-wheat pasta, its cooks still succeeded in creating such imposing dishes as polenta di carne di maiale salata calabrese (Calabrian-style mush with salted pork) and another polenta made with all of the vegetables and legumes of the Calabrian countryside. And there is a preparation of the Abruzzi and Latium in which polenta is combined with pork trimmings.

From Naples, corn quickly spread to neighboring Latium and throughout the Papal States. It was customarily consumed in the form of mush, in keeping with ancient tradition in that area where pultes, or mush made from various cereals but principally wheat, had long been the dietary staple. That preparation was highly praised by Cato the Elder and other ancient Roman writers.

The first to record the appearance of corn in Italy was Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1500-1570), who firmly insisted that it had not originated in Asia.

  In 1580, Costanzo Felici of the Romagna informed his readers that “this Indian cereal, which is improperly called granoturco [Turkish wheat], is appreciated in our lands, being used to make a rather white and sweet bread. I do not know if it appears in other dishes.”

It became a culinary fixture, along with rice and potatoes, from the first moment it appeared in the north. Writing in 1568, Mattioli observed that “the country people who live near the border between Italy and Germany, make polenta from [corn] flour. It is cooked in a mass, then cut with a wire into large, thin slices and arranged on a platter with cheese or with butter and they eat it rather gluttonously.”


The cereal was ignored by recipebooks intended for the well-to-do or their cooks and excluded from the official menus of the ruling classes. Nor was it given much attention in the herbals of the time.

It was mentioned in a book on herbs, published by the French expert Jean Ruel in 1536, and, then, in another written by the German researcher Leonhart Fuchs and published in 1542. He was the first to call it Turcicum and added that “it is already found in all German gardens.” His book also contained the first drawing of an ear of corn.

The second appeared in 1556 in Giovan Battista Ramusio’s Delle Navigationi et Viaggi, a collection of works on early travelers.


Corn may have been slow to enter the herbals and recipebooks but the esthetic appeal of an ear of maize as a decorative element had an immediate impact on the art world. One of the first artists to include corn among the objects depicted in his works was Raffaello Sanzio. In 1516, a few years before his death, the artist included three ears of maize in the upper frieze of his “Story of Cupid and Pysche” fresco in the Villa Farnese in Rome.

Other ears of corn adorn the columns of the Doges’ Palace in Venice, which was built around 1550. Those carvings serve to document the early arrival of the plant in lands bordering the city’s lagoon and the plant’s rapid spread throughout northeastern Italy during the following century.

Ears of corn were employed in five works, painted between 1573 and 1591, by the genial Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593), official painter to the imperial court at Prague and Vienna. They are elements in his imaginative allegories of “Summer,” “Autumn” and “Vaticanus,” the ancient Roman god of harvests. Those works were dedicated to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, grandson of Charles V. In addition to the ears of corn, there were other novel foods from the New World in the paintings—peppers and the tomato, among them.

Although it was less appreciated than wheat, corn steadily spread to new agricultural areas, in the process acquiring different names and definitions that varied from place to place and one period to another. In addition to spiga (ear) di Portogallo, as it was called by the Portuguese, it was known as grano di Spagna (Spanish wheat) in the Pyrenees Mountains and grano d’India (wheat of India) at Bayonne in France. In Tuscany, it was dura di Siria (Syrian sorghum) but the most commonly used name in Italy as well as in the Netherlands and Germany, was granoturco, in keeping with the consolidated tradition of assigning all novelties an Eastern origin. The Russians followed suit with turca kukuro.


The Turks, on the other hand, who were well aware of the fact that they had nothing to do with the domestication of this cereal, called corn grano dei Rum (literally, wheat of the Romans or wheat of the Westerners).

In the United States, the cereal is almost always referred to as corn, while in Britain it is called maize. Corn is more properly the principal grain of a given place, which can be any type of cereal. Maize, variously spelled, is the cereal’s proper name in all European languages. The word is derived from the Spanish maíz, taken in turn from the mahiz of the Taino Indians of the Caribbean.

The point at which corn left the garden and the experimental plot and began to take its place in the fields and on the market is of the greatest interest in tracing the plant’s development as a major nutritional resource. That fundamental transition occurred in Italy only in the course of the 17th-18th centuries, when the introduction of the cultivation of beans, also imported from the Americas, provided an effective means of restoring the soil’s fertility. Beans, being a legume, fix nitrogen in the earth.

Beans and corn spread throughout Italy at the same time, therefore, and their diffusion was assisted by the renewed emphasis by the Council of Trent (1545-1563) upon strict observance of days of abstinence from meat, especially on Fridays and during Lent. Beans and corn contained vital proteins that effectively replaced those contained by the meat that had to be passed up in observance of the church’s discipline.

Corn slowly spread throughout northern Italy and, ground into meal or flour, it came to be used in making and, in the process, revolutionizing an ancient and extremely Italian preparation, polenta.The dish, which originated at least as far back as the early Roman Republic, was regularly consumed by the country people, who had customarily used millet, sorghum, barley and buckwheat in preparing it.

Such cereals, regarded as less noble than wheat, constituted for centuries the dietary base of the poorest segments of the rural population.


Polenta became polenta di mais and corn, whether white or yellow, eventually replaced all of the other cereals and provided nourishment for innumerable generations of poor working people. Cornmeal polenta supplanted bread and was habitually consumed at the midday meal, which usually began, and often ended, with polenta boiled in milk. Along with pasta in broth, the leftover mush, cut in slices and toasted over wood coals, served as the scanty accompaniment for whatever might be available for the evening meal. Slices were often taken to the mill or factory to be eaten cold as a snack along with cocomerin or cucumbers preserved in vinegar and flavored with linseed oil.

Although it became the principal dish of the Po Valley, corn failed to maintain an importance place in the diet in the Naples area, where it had appeared even earlier.

That may have been due to the fact that vegetables grew in greater abundance in the south so that there was less need to add new foods to the pantry. In any case, polenta had been eased aside at the end of the 18th century by pasta, the “queen of the south”—or macaroni, as they say in Naples—and tomato.


Different kinds of polenta were available but it was the yellow cornmeal in the Milanese style that was the first to be admitted to Il Cuoco Galante, a recipebook aimed at the rich and sophisticated that was written by Celestinian monk and gourmet Vincenzo Corrado and first published at Naples in 1773. In the chapter on timbales, Corrado wrote that “meal of corn from India mixed with a bit of grated Parmesan is cooked in capon broth flavored with butter. When it is cold, cut it into thin slices and arrange them in layers with Parmesan, butter and cream. Cook [in the oven] and serve.”

Another Milanese polenta recipe was given by Francesco Leonardi, former cook to Catherine the Great of Russia, in the 1797 edition of his L’Apicio Moderno, which was published in Rome. The first edition had appeared in 1790.

The dish was flavored not only with traditional ingredients like “fresh butter and grated Parmesan” but also with such deluxe items as “fine cinnamon” and “slices of truffle cooked in butter.”


In his “La Donna di Garbo,” playwright Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793) has Rosaura prepare a somewhat less imposing dish for Arlecchino, polenta “basted with fresh, yellow and delicate butter and then as much fat, yellow and well-grated cheese.” Simple as it may be, the dish has the power to send him into ecstasy, according to Arlecchino.

Following a period of decline, polenta has once again returned to Italian tables, this time as a food for the well-to-do and stylish. Dishes once eaten mainly by the inhabitants of the lands bordered by the Alps to the north are once more in vogue, such as the polenta with vegetables of Lombardy.

Polenta with stewed or spit-roasted small birds, polenta unta, with butter, Parmesan, garlic and onions, pasticciata, with sausage, pork, mushrooms and tomato sauce, and polenta alla spianatora (spread out on a pastry board) of Lombard and the Veneto are also much in demand.

In addition to those dishes, mention should be made of the cornmeal gnocchi and pizze prepared throughout Italy, as well as Friuli’s suf (a cream of cornmeal), the Venetian zaleti (a cornmeal “cookie” flavored with vanilla or lemon peel and sultanas) that is similar to the gialetti of Emilia-Romagna, the becutte or beccùte (which include raisins, pine nuts, walnuts, almonds and dried figs) and frustenga (made with dried figs and raisins) of the Marches, the pastuccia (baked cornmeal with sausages, raisins and pork belly or cheek) of the Abruzzi and the migliaccio con i cicoli  (with pork cracklings (ciccioli), cheese and sausages) of the Campanian tradition.