l, not -l wrote:
> On 17-Jun-2007, sf wrote:
>
>> I Googled parched corn recipe.... it sounds dry to me. Recipe
>> narratives mention popcorn in the same sentence. Not sure where his
>> gravy came from.
>>
>> Here's what one blog says:
>> "Tastes nothing like the Planters corn nuts. My husband says that
>> these crack instead of crunch, and mine taste like corn with some
>> salt. Well, that is what they are. I didn't expect that my first
>> non-burning of said corn snack was going to be perfect. They are not
>> bad, but not what I would encourage my friends to eat. They do have
>> that same jaw soreness that the store bought corn nuts induce."
>
> GladCorn http://www.gladcorn.com/ is a commercial product that is a
> close cousin, if not the same thing, as parched corn.
>
> My mother, age 85, who was born and lived much of her life in rural
> Kentucky, enjoyed a trip down memory lane when I bought her a bag of
> GladCorn. She said, when she was a child, they made parched corn in
> a cast iron skillet from field corn kernals - the hard (dent) corn,
> not soft, sweet corn.
Dad did call it "parched field corn" but that's normally used as livestock
feed. Of course during the depression that may be all they had. He didn't
mention it being crunchy.
They ate it as a treat, much as we would eat
> popcorn today. Often it was available after harvest, when families
> would walk through fields picking up the ears of corn missed by the
> mechanical reapers (called gleaning) I recall gleaning my
> grandfather's corn field as a child, in the early-to-mid fifties.
>
> Who knows what a poor family might do for a meal; if parched corn was
> all that was available to fill you up, you might make a little gravy
> to stretch it or make it a bit easier to swallow as a main course.
> Of course, in the alternative, the fellow who'd like to have some
> might just be confused - I do know a lot of folks who ate at hominy
> smothered in gravy.
I'm pretty sure this wasn't hominy but then again who knows what his
grandmother called "hominy".
Jill