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 English, North American and Australian English), is a cereal grain first domesticated by indigenous peoples of Mexico, indigenous ...
.
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 t ...
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
Dent corn, also known as grain corn, is a type of field corn with a high soft starch content. It received its name because of the small indentation, or "dent", at the crown of each kernel on a ripe ear of corn. Reid's Yellow Dent is a variety d ...
,
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 be ...
, 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, 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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