Popped Culture: A Social History of Popcorn in America. By Andrew F. Smith. (Washington, Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001 [University of North Carolina Press, 1999]. Pp. xxi + 264, ISBN 1-56098-921-1)

It’s easy to imagine a general book about popcorn being not very good. But despite the corny pun in its title, Popped Culture is a good book. It has what you would want if you were teaching a course on the evolution of popular foods, their vernacular preparations and their meanings. It has a good index, a very full and useful bibliography, and excellent attention to its sources in the form of real reference notes. And it has many pages (fifty!) of small-font, well-documented, historical recipes for popcorn. This is not a supermarket book. Andrew Smith, its author, teaches food history at the Open School University in New York and has written previous books on the history of tomatoes and on ketchup. It is a scholarly book that happens to come on the recent great wave of popcorn popularity. The book opens with a balanced history of popcorn, basing that history in what is known and on the identification of what cannot any longer be known. He bursts open the popular American idea that native Americans showed the technique of making popcorn to the Pilgrims in the early seventeenth century. Smith shows it to be a late nineteenth century figment, part of the growth of a national foundation myth in America in that time. What then, I can hear you ask, really is the origin of popcorn? Read Smith’s opening chapter for a better explanation, as it is more complex than I can serve up here. The history is clouded — the name “popcorn” arrived much later than the thing itself, so there is little early documentation on its invention and spread. But Smith does a good job of dispelling some of that cloudiness. Suffice it to say that more grains pop than just corn or certain strains of corn. Some grains pop better than others and a hard kernel helps in this regard. For centuries, corn has regularly been parched, that is dried somewhat, to prevent sprouting and to help long-term storage. No doubt it was in the process of accelerated parching that the propensity of some strains to pop was discovered. Perhaps very early indeed: archaeological evidence in New Mexico suggests Amerindians were eating it from time to time about 5000 years ago (8). The popcorn craze began in New England in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. It was not the autochthonous development later writers had it. Based on import records, Smith suggests the fad came from South America, and perhaps from Africa. Corn was a New World species, but it had spread quickly around the world after the Spanish established themselves in the Americas. Popcorn seems to have been popular in Mexico in the seventeenth century but no earlier records exist. Nonetheless, there are indications of it having spread to China by the end of the sixteenth century. But popping corn did not resemble the social and culinary phenomenon it is today until the middle of the nineteenth century. And, yes, that was an American thing. Or, rather, Smith presents only American sources on the mid-nineteenth century efflorescence of popcorn culture; perhaps it was more widely done. But in any case, by 1848, American dictionaries recognized the word “popcorn” and, by the end of the American Civil War, popcorn was an icon of American popular culture, with outdoor “popcorn furnaces” at local fairs throughout that country. The American Patent Office was getting lots of inventions for home popping and magazines were distributing recipes for cakes, candies, dressings, and soups made from popped corn. Reading Popped Culture, as I did, simultaneously with Jared Diamond’s best-selling …