Time to savor a kernel of truth about popcorn

I have noticed that in recent years we have become a more informal society.

  Coat and tie are no longer required in some of our best restaurants and “country club casual” is the accepted dress code for what used to be rather formal occasions.

Allan and I are opera fans and have attended many live performances where the audiences were dressed to the nines.

With the recent advent of HD telecasts of the Met in theaters across the country, the formality of opera attendance is gone.

Jeans, popcorn and a soft drink have become the norm at Met telecasts. Several Saturdays ago, we, too, enjoyed popcorn at the recent telecast of Puccini’s “La Rondine.”

Popcorn is truly the fast finger-food that links all ages of American life.

It is the great equalizer of society. Popcorn connects toddlers and grannies, moviegoers and sports fans, beer drinkers and teetotalers and even cowboys and Indians.

We eat it not because it is good for us, which it is, but because it’s fun to eat.

Bites of excitement

Each year every man, woman, and child eats an average of 60 quarts of popcorn, popped from about 950 million pounds of unpopped kernels. We love popcorn, I guess, because it explodes with the noise and excitement of our daily lives.

Nebraska is the No. 1 grower of popcorn kernels, with Indiana also claiming that title. Together these two states grow 65 percent of all popping kernels.

Today, popcorn is a $2 billion dollar industry.

Popcorn has always had eye appeal. It was this eye appeal that first attracted Cortez and his Spanish explorers when they saw Aztec girls place garlands of white popcorn on their heads like orange blos-soms.

The Aztecs said that it was a kind of corn that bursts when parched, discloses its contents and makes it look like a very white flower.

The pilgrims thought of popcorn as “parched corn” when they first saw corn kernels thrown into hot embers and turn almost inside out to become white and flowery.

A century later Benjamin Franklin approved the method of throwing corn kernels into sand heated in an iron pot until each kernel burst and threw out a white substance three tmes its original size.

That ‘poppability’ factor

Even though all kinds of corn pop to some degree, not all will turn inside out to become light, white, and fluffy.

The two major types of popcorn grown commercially are “rice” with sharp pointed kernels and “pearl” with smooth rounded crowns.

Both contain high portions of hard starch, which gives them their “poppability.”

Scientists tell us that expansion depends on the moisture within the kernel that turns into steam when the kernel is heated and then suddenly explodes. Poppa-bility is best when the kernel’s moisture is between 13.5 and 15.5 percent and when the kernel is heated in such a way that the water vapor can escape.

In the past decade popcorn sales have increased more than 50 percent.

Americans eat 70 percent of their popcorn at home and they microwave 60 percent of that.

The surge of popcorn popularity began in World War II when the people at home sacrificed their love of candy for the fighting men and women.

Movie theaters started installing popcorn machines.

Charles C. Cretors of Chicago was the first to develop a machine in 1885 to pop corn in such a volume that it could be sold from wagons propelled first by hand, then by horse, and finally by gasoline motor.

Frederick William Rueckheim, also of Chicago, improved the popcorn he sold from his corner stand by sweetening it with molasses.

He thought it was swell, topnotch, a cracker of an idea.

The result was Cracker Jack.

However, there was nothing new about sweetening parched or popped corn. The Indians had been doing it for centuries.

With this molasses candy, Rueckheim and his brother Louis also used nuts and other ingredients together but finally settled on popcorn and peanuts.

Their inventiveness was not in the product but in the marketing. Their first sales were at the 1893 World Expo in Chicago.

At first the brothers sold their product in tins and barrels.

Then Henry Eckstein joined them in 1902 and developed a moisture-proof sealed box that contained the first “green stamp.”

This was a printed coupon that could be redeemed for adult prizes like clothing and sporting goods.

In 1912 the Rueckheims replaced coupons with children’s prizes such as miniature books, magnifying glasses, tiny pitchers, beads, and metal trains.

There was a prize in every package.

In the 1930s they added presidential medals, movie-star cards, and Mystery Club prizes.

During World War II, Cracker Jack went to war, and the company was commended for “high achievement in the production of materials needed by our armed forces.

In the 1960s the company was sold to Borden and moved into the modern age with foil bags, the big party-pack tubs, safety-tested toys, and automated plant machinery that pops eighteen to twenty tons of corn every day.

To round out the popcorn story, in the 1960s the kernel itself was streamlined by a county extension agent in Indiana named Orville Redenbacher.

He developed hybrid popcorn he called “Gourmet Popping Corn.”

“It’s a snowflake variety,” said Redenbacher.

It has higher popping volume than other kinds. He claimed that one ounce of kernels popped to a quart with fewer unpopped kernels than the what the industry called “old maids.”

Redenbacher put his smiling face on the label and marketed his gourmet kernels from the back of a car until Hunt-Wesson bought his company in 1974.

Six-million-dollar television campaigns, plus clever marketing, have made Orville’s face and name ubiquitous.

Popcorn is almost everywhere. I saw it recently in a doctor’s office, where the employees were snacking on a big tub of freshly microwaved popcorn.

I still can’t help shaking my head, though, when I see busloads of elderly ladies carrying tubs of popcorn into the theater to see the Metropolitan Opera presentations.