Handmade Mill Goods from Organic Heirloom Grains

What it Means to be Heirloom
Heirloom corn is any corn developed and planted prior to 1950. Like other heirloom fruits and vegetables, heirloom corn is valued for possessing flavor and texture superior to that of modern hybrids. Anson Mills’ heirloom field corns have a long legacy of great taste and texture—the youngest date back to 1860; older varieties are pre-Columbian or Colonial.

The term heirloom also suggests open pollination—living or viable seeds capable of producing crops that look and taste like their parents. Heirloom corns aren’t comfortable cranking out enormous harvests, but produce their best flavor at 60 bushels per acre with natural input nutrients--not a bath of chemicals. They are meant to ripen and dry naturally like fine, vine-ripened produce (a practice that leaves them vulnerable to pest and weather damage), but do not ripen all at once or grow to the same height. Many are not suited for machine harvest. Growing these old corn varieties poses risk and cost to growers. Anson Mills guarantees income for its farmers and bonuses them for selective harvest. As such, the base prices for these corns run 4 to 12 times the cost of commodities corns.

The reward for this cost and labor is, of course, flavor–-complex, robust corn flavor that you never get in grocery store grits or cornmeal.

What it Means to be a Commodity
Contemporary hybrid field corns were developed to achieve high yields—100 to 200 bushels per acre (a bushel is about 60 pounds). The seeds of modern hybrids will not reproduce true to type, and must be purchased and planted new, year after year. Commodity mill corns will be hauled from the field green, forced-dried and stripped of their germ (the oil-rich embryo of a corn kernel) to keep them from going rancid. In the process most of their flavor is sacrificed.

anson - 8
Red Trentino Flint corn used to make Anson Mills' polenta integrale

Heirloom Corn

Native American corn planting and harvesting, its milling by Native American women, and the dish that became “grits” was a prominent topic in the first mail to England from the settlement of Charlestowne in 1670. In fact, Charlestowne owed much of its success overall to an abundance of Native American field gardens. European settlers knew little of agriculture, old or new world, but Indian gardens were sophisticated, diverse and based on multiple varieties of corn intercropped with fruits and vegetables, medicinal plants and herbs.

All great plantation kitchen gardens around Charleston were mirror images of Indian gardens and included sweet and mill corn, which were planted “Indian” style well after mechanized planting and harvesting changed agricultural methods in large fields. The Carolina tradition of cross breeding sweet and mill corn every 5 years to produce spectacular grits corn was a Native American tradition as well.

Sadly, though the culture of corn and grits survived unchanged in the fields and on the tables of Coastal Carolina well into the 20th century, the indigenous population and its culture were almost completely lost after the Yemassee rebellion of 1763.

What did change was the quality and flavor profile of grits produced from monocrop hybrid corn, compared with grits produced from corn bred historically to provide compelling taste, texture and nutrition. The corns that remain least changed from their Native American antecedents are those that provide riveting flavors. These are corns of many colors, of varying heights in the field (up to 15 feet), and of varying hardness and kernel architecture--based on whether they were bred for fresh hand milling, parching over fire or processing to hominy with potash.

European “improvements” to corn came early to address storage and yield per acre demands for export commodities and created a Colonial Carolina two-tier system of quality (kitchen gardens) versus quantity (field corn for export and feed).

The personal and distinct corn varieties of Charleston’s kitchen garden heritage drew Anson Mills into heirloom farming and artisan milling. These corns, called “heirloom single family hand selects” today, have quirky proper names like John Haulk, Jimmy Red, Hawkins, and Gadsden No Cobb. As corn varieties disappear at an alarming rate and only those rare and devout Carolinians engage in hobby-cropping for their family, Anson Mills acts a the sole repository for some of coastal Carolina and Georgia’s most famous family mill corns. The best of these come from retiring bootleggers who, in the recent past, have good reason to hand select their own corn--to stay in business and out of jail.