Can You Make Popcorn From Regular Corn On The Cob?

In areas of Central and South America, where corn is a native plant, people have been popping popcorn for roughly 7,000 years, as National Geographic reports. Some of the oldest evidence of popcorn, for example, was found in Peru. Corn, generally speaking, is kind of a wonder food: packed with nutrients, easy to store, and the husks are also quite versatile. For this reason, corn was one of the most traded commodities in all the pre-Columbian Americas, according to Serious Eats. And although nobody knows for sure exactly who, why, or when it happened, at some point during this period, heat and kernels of corn were brought together, just to see what might happen.

What happened, of course, is that those kernels popped. With that, popcorn was born. The popcorn back then was nothing like the popcorn we know and love today, per Serious Eats. Instead of light and fluffy popcorn, this kind of popcorn is described more like parched corn, made by drying out kernels and heating them up over fire in something like a frying pan, creating a foodstuff that was more like a corn nut. Nevertheless, this snack caught on and over the years, popcorn preparation techniques were developed, and certain kinds of corn were bred expressly for this purpose. By the 19th century, popcorn was common at fairs and other kinds of special events, and special popcorn popping machines were invented (via Serious Eats).

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