Botanical Accuracy
Max's Degrees – Product of Baltimore, MD
Description: where botany meets the cutting board
It’s August, and everyone from the American Midwest knows that late summer means fresh sweet corn, and a lot of it. When I was growing up in Indiana, every few days during corn season we would pick up a dozen ears from my family’s favorite roadside stand, just hours after harvest, and cook them right away, before the kernels could start converting their sugar into starch.
Corn season typically peaked the final week of the Indiana State Fair, which always fell between my sister’s birthday and mine. We felt like the whole world was celebrating with us since the Indiana State Fair really is just a giant party, with rides and games and food and music and anatomically impressive hogs. So every year we went to revel in the indulgent atmosphere of the fair alongside thousands of unbridled Hoosiers from all over the state sweating in tank tops and showing off their best pickles. But
For this month’s botany lab, I have created a cold summer soup that is as much a celebration of decadent State Fair food as an homage to the millennia of cultivation and adaptation that makes that food possible. The soup features corn four ways, and its various ingredients are available to us only because people have been growing corn (more accurately, maize) and creating distinct varieties for a very long time over an unusually wide geographical area. Maize as a crop goes back to Mesoamerica about 9 thousa
Botanical Accuracy
Max's Degrees – Product of Baltimore, MD