Weekends in the Kitchen: Corn Fed

While visiting Plymouth, Massachusetts, for season 10 of Weekends with Yankee, we stopped into the Plimoth Patuxet Museums’ gristmill, where antique water-powered millstones grind exceptional meal from wheat, rye, oats, and flint corn. Among the grains: a variety of White Cap flint corn that was first cultivated by the Narragansett tribe of Rhode Island and has been in use for more than 300 years.

At the museum’s nearby Historic Patuxet Homesite, lead interpreter and Wampanoag culinary expert Malissa Costa showed me how Indigenous cooks have long used ground corn to make nasaump, a porridge that can be enriched with native berries, nuts, and maple syrup, depending on the season. In our case, blueberries and walnuts added such rich flavor that I couldn’t wait to go home and make it into a corn and berry porridge for breakfast (though I learned from Costa that the Wampanoag, who didn’t designate specific “breakfast” or “dinner” foods, would serve nasaump at any time of day).

Later, I met up with chef and lifelong history student Marc Sheehan at Northern Spy restaurant in Canton, Massachusetts, where he explained how early European colonists came to rely on this native style of porridge, which they called “samp,” as a staple food. Then, tipping his hat to Wampanoag msíckquatash (aka succotash), Sheehan served up pristine trout filets over a stew of corn, beans, and hominy enriched with butter, lemon, and aromatics—all atop a pool of creamy samp (find Sheehan’s succotash recipe at newengland.com/succotash).

Back in my own kitchen, with bags of the gristmill’s ground corn on hand, I developed the following recipes. The first is the perfect dinner for chilly nights: a flavor-packed skillet pie of classic chili topped with a scallion-flecked cornbread crust. The second is my own variation on nasaump, cooked with cranberries (native to New England) and topped with toasted walnuts and fresh berries. I’m certain I used more maple syrup than a Wampanoag cook ever would, but my tastes have been shaped by a lifetime of easy access to sugar—pour as generously as you like.

Corn Recipes:

Cornbread & Chili Skillet Pie
Corn & Berry Porridge

Amy Traverso

Amy Traverso is the senior food editor at Yankee and cohost of the public television series Weekends with Yankee, a coproduction with GBH. Previously, she was food editor at Boston magazine and an associate food editor at Sunset magazine. Her work has also been published in The Boston Globe, Saveur, and Travel & Leisure, and she has appeared on Hallmark Home & Family, The Martha Stewart Show, Throwdown with Bobby Flay, and Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. Amy is the author of The Apple Lover’s Cookbook, which was a finalist for the Julia Child Award for best first-time author and won an IACP Cookbook Award in the “American” category.

More by Amy Traverso