Pod corn or wild maize is a variety of
maize
Maize ( ; ''Zea mays'' subsp. ''mays'', from es, maíz after tnq, mahiz), also known as corn (North American and Australian English), is a cereal grain first domesticated by indigenous peoples in southern Mexico about 10,000 years ago. Th ...
.
It is not a wild ancestor of maize but rather a mutant that forms leaves around each kernel.
Pod corn (''tunicata'' Sturt) is not grown commercially, but it is preserved in some localities.
Pod corn forms
glume
In botany, a glume is a bract (leaf-like structure) below a spikelet in the inflorescence (flower cluster) of grasses (Poaceae) or the flowers of sedges (Cyperaceae). There are two other types of bracts in the spikelets of grasses: the lemma and ...
s around each kernel which is caused by a mutation at the
Tunicate
A tunicate is a marine invertebrate animal, a member of the subphylum Tunicata (). It is part of the Chordata, a phylum which includes all animals with dorsal nerve cords and notochords (including vertebrates). The subphylum was at one time ca ...
locus. Because of its bizarre appearance, pod corn has had a religious significance to certain Native American tribes.
The six major types of corn are
dent corn,
flint corn
Flint corn (''Zea mays'' var. ''indurata''; also known as Indian corn or sometimes calico corn) is a variant of maize, the same species as common corn. Because each kernel has a hard outer layer to protect the soft endosperm, it is likened to bei ...
, pod corn,
popcorn
Popcorn (also called popped corn, popcorns or pop-corn) is a variety of corn kernel which expands and puffs up when heated; the same names also refer to the foodstuff produced by the expansion.
A popcorn kernel's strong hull contains the se ...
,
flour corn
Flour corn (''Zea mays'' var. ''amylacea'') is a variety of corn with a soft starchy endosperm and a thin pericarp. It is primarily used to make corn flour
Cornflour may refer to:
* Cornflour (in the UK), corn starch, from the endosperm of ...
, and
sweet corn
Sweet corn (''Zea mays'' convar. ''saccharata'' var. ''rugosa''), also called sugar corn and pole corn, is a variety of maize grown for human consumption with a high sugar content. Sweet corn is the result of a naturally occurring recessive muta ...
.
[Linda Campbell Franklin, "Corn," in Andrew F. Smith (ed.), ''The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America''. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 (pp. 551–558), p. 553.]
References
Maize
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