The branch of man-feeding is, of course, an important department of the subject.  The forms in which it is made palatable and nutritious are numerous, and appear under names of American origin that will sound strange in the English ear.  Before the corn is ripe it is frequently roasted in the state of green ears.  “When the whole of the grains are brown, you lay them in a dish and put them upon the table; they are so many little bags of roasted milk, the sweetest that can be imagined, or, rather, are of the most delightful taste.  You leave a little tail of the ear, two inches long, or thereabouts, to turn it and handle it by.  You take a thin piece of butter, which will cling to the knife on one side, while you gently rub it over the ear from the other side; then the ear is buttered:  then you take a little salt according to your fancy, and sprinkle it over the ear:  you then take the tail of the ear in one hand, and bite the grains off the cobb.”  In the shape of porridge the corn is called suppawn.

Mush is another form of the corn meal; Mr. Cobbett says, “it is not a word to squall out over a piano-forte,” “but it is a very good word, and a real English word.”  It seems to mean something which is half pudding, half porridge. Homany is the shape in which the corn meal is generally used in the southern states of America, but Mr. Cobbett has never seen it. Samp is the corn skinned, as we shell oats, or make pearl barley; it is then boiled with pork or other meat, as we boil peas.  It is in fact corn soup, superior to all preparations of pulse, on account of their indigestible qualities.

The corn flour is not so adhesive as the wheat flour; it is consequently not so well adapted to puddings and bread-making:  nevertheless, Mr. Cobbett contrives to show that his corn can make both inimitably; but in respect of cakes there are no cakes in the world like the corn-cakes of America.  They have the additional merit of being made in a minute:  “A Yankee will set hunger at defiance if you turn him into a wilderness with a flint and steel, and a bag of corn-meal or flour.  He comes to the spot where he means to make his cookery, makes a large wood fire upon the ground, which soon consumes every thing combustible beneath, and produces a large heap of coals.  While the fire is preparing itself, the Yankee takes a little wooden or tin bowl (many a one has done it in the crown of his hat), in which he mixes up a sufficient quantity of his meal with water, and forms it into a cake of about a couple of inches thick.  With a pole he then draws the fire open, and lays the cake down upon where the centre of the fire was.  To avoid burning, he rakes some ashes over the cake first; he then rakes on a suitable quantity of the live embers, and his cake is cooked in a short space of time.”  According to Mr. Cobbett, he grew ninety-five bushels of corn on one acre of ground; reckoning the value of this corn equal to bad and stale samples