History of Popcorn

"Americans consume more popcorn by volume than any other snack," author Andrew F. Smith wrote in Popped Culture: A Social History of Popcorn in America, a colorful compendium of popcorn facts and history. Estimates vary, but the average American now eats about 70 quarts of popcorn every year, making the U.S. number one in global popcorn consumption. To understand this unique obsession, let's take a quick look at the history of popcorn in America.

"Who invented popcorn?" Ask the average American, and you'll likely hear an account of Native Americans sharing popcorn with the Pilgrims at the first Thanksgiving feast. The story, however, is untrue, created during a decade when popcorn was being consumed in unprecedented volumes, and centennial America was mythologizing its history.

"The specific association of popcorn with the 'First Thanksgiving' and Pilgrim myths generated during the 1880s underscored popcorn's growing national significance," Smith writes in Popped Culture. The Thanksgiving origin story can be traced back to an 1889 novel, Standish of Standish: A Story of the Pilgrims, by Jane Adams. An Amerindian origin for popcorn is likely, but impossible to pinpoint. One of the earliest accounts of popcorn in North America comes from Bernardino Sahagun, a Franciscan friar who came to Mexico from Spain in 1529. In his General History of the Things of New Spain, Sahagun reported that when an Aztec tribe, the Tlalocs, held a feast in honor of their god Opochtli, they "strewed toasted [popped] corn grains [known as mumuchitl] like hailstones, or like scattered dice."

Popcorn exploded into the American mainstream beginning in the 1840s - thanks in large part to the invention of an old fashioned popcorn popper or two. "One reason why popcorn became so popular during the second half of the nineteenth century was the invention of corn poppers," Smith wrote.

The first patent for an old fashioned popcorn maker was granted in 1866, and commercial companies began manufacturing corn poppers - and marketing them in mail-order catalogs - in the 1870s. The most commercially successful old fashioned popcorn maker of that era consisted of two pans separated by a wire mesh big enough for raw kernels to fall through. The corn was placed in one pan and popped on the stove, and the "machine" was turned upside down - all by hand, of course - when the corn was mostly popped. And thus began the modern history of popcorn in America.