Corn: one of only two ingredients that were already here

Of everything Dominican cooking treats as its own, corn is one of only two things that were already here before 1492. The other is the peanut. Everything else arrived later, by ship.

Domesticated in the Balsas valley

Corn was domesticated from teosinte, a wild grass, in the Balsas river valley of southwestern Mexico at least 8,700 years ago. It is the earliest recorded date for its cultivation, established by the archaeobotanical work of Dolores Piperno and Anthony Ranere.

The proof it was already in the Caribbean

This is not an inference: it is DNA. In coprolites, fossilized feces, from the La Hueca-Sorcé site on Vieques, Puerto Rico, radiocarbon dated between 245 and 600 AD, corn DNA accounted for 48.4% of all identified plant material. Nearly half of what those people were eating, twelve centuries before Columbus.

What it means for this kitchen

Chacá in the south, chenchén, the guanimos of the Cibao: these are dishes built on an ingredient that came from nowhere else. It was here, and the cooking built on top of it is one of the few genuinely native layers in the Dominican repertoire.

Sources

• Smithsonian, “New research reveals earliest evidence of corn in the New World”. si.edu · PNAS. pnas.org
• DNA in coprolites from La Hueca-Sorcé, Vieques. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov