Started by Ravi Subramanian (@ravi_eats) ·
cooking corn with lime kept people healthy for thousands of years
Mesoamerican cooks have cooked corn in alkaline lime water for thousands of years. When corn spread to Europe and the American South, the crop traveled but the technique didn't, and people living mostly on corn got pellagra.
6 sources · 44 min down the hole
How I got here
- Started with
- Why is corn for tortillas soaked in lime?
- Ended at
- Nicotinic acid
The Trail
- “why do you soak corn in lime” (google.com)
- Nixtamalization (en.wikipedia.org)
- Masa (en.wikipedia.org)
- Pellagra (en.wikipedia.org)
- Joseph Goldberger (en.wikipedia.org)
proved pellagra wasn't contagious, partly by experimenting on himself
- Nicotinic acid (en.wikipedia.org)
What I came away with
Nixtamalization frees up niacin that's otherwise bound up and unavailable, and makes the dough hold together as masa. Goldberger showed in the 1910s and 20s that pellagra was about diet, not germs, and niacin was later pinned down as the missing piece.
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