Popcorn as a breakfast cereal was consumed by Americans in the 1800s and generally consisted of popcorn with milk and a sweetener. Popcorn balls (popped kernels stuck together with a sugary "glue") were hugely popular around the turn of the 20th century, but their popularity has since waned.
Breakfast Food
Ahead of its time and very likely a role model for breakfast cereals to come, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, popcorn was eaten just as we eat cereal today. Long before the advent of the corn flake, Ella Kellogg enjoyed her popcorn ground with milk or cream.
Early French explorers observed Iroquois popping popcorn in the early 1600s in the Great Lakes region, and it became a pre-cursor to the ordinary breakfast cereals that line the grocery store shelves today. Colonial families ate it in a bowl with milk and sugar, just like the corn flakes or rice crisps we eat today.
Popcorn was a breakfast food in colonial America
Popped popcorn was served in a bowl, and topped with sugar and cream. It was also eaten later in the day in a savory way, prepared with a fireplace popcorn popper — kernels were placed in a cylinder made of thin iron that turned on an axle to ensure even and proper heat.
Yet before we came to view popcorn as a snack reserved for sporting events and movie nights, it was originally used as a breakfast meal in Colonial America. In the mornings, popcorn would be served in a bowl with cream and sugar, eaten as we would with modern-day cereal.
It's been said that popcorn was part of the first Thanksgiving feast, in Plymouth Colony in 1621. According to myth, Squanto himself taught the Pilgrims to raise and harvest corn, and pop the kernels for a delicious snack.
Popcorn as a breakfast cereal was consumed by Americans in the 1800s and generally consisted of popcorn with milk and a sweetener. Popcorn balls (popped kernels stuck together with a sugary "glue") were hugely popular around the turn of the 20th century, but their popularity has since waned.
Before cereal, in the mid 1800s, the American breakfast was not all that different from other meals. Middle- and upper-class Americans ate eggs, pastries, and pancakes, but also oysters, boiled chickens, and beef steaks.
For breakfast colonist might have eaten porridge or mush, which is a warm cereal and could have been made with cornmeal, oats or beans. They may have had bread with butter and jam, but one thing they would not have had was milk!
Beans, cornmeal mush, Johnnycakes or pancakes, and coffee were the usual breakfast. Fresh milk was available from the dairy cows that some families brought along, and pioneers took advantage go the rough rides of the wagon to churn their butter.
The United States is the No. 1 producer and consumer of popcorn in the world. “Americans are estimated to eat 15 billion quarts of popcorn every year,” Foley said. “Very little popcorn is imported into the U.S. We produce and eat more popcorn than any other country.
That happened in Chicago in 1885, when Charles Cretors invented a lightweight electric machine that popped corn in oil, allowing vendors to easily move along with crowds in search of a better profit. Eight years later, Cretors improved the model by adding a contraption that would butter and salt the popcorn, too.
The hard endosperm expands in volume turning the hard, inedible kernel into a fluffy, white, edible nugget.
Even as breakfast cereals became less like wheat rocks and more like granola—the immediate successor to granula—and corn flakes, they were still dry, which meant milk stuck around as a useful tool to soften them up.
Popcorn is a whole grain packed with fiber and carbs. Carbohydrates make tryptophan, an amino acid important for sleep, more available to the brain. A study found that food such as popcorn and nuts provided a longer sleep duration than food such as burgers and pizza.
The people who lived at Paredones and Huaca Prieta would've cooked corn several ways: Wrapping a cob (in an as yet undetermined material) and resting it on coals, roasting a cob directly over a flame, or cooking a cob in an earthen oven, Piperno said.
The modern breakfast
In the early years of the Victorian era breakfast would have consisted, if you could afford it, of cold meats, cheese and beer. In time this was replaced by porridge, fish, eggs and bacon - the "full English".
Barley bread, porridge, gruel and pasta, for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
The servants of Downton would have a simple satisfying meal: hot, most likely consisting of simple porridge, perhaps some bread, and coffee, which we see in our first glimpse of the servant's dining hall (photo above).
Much like today, families usually ate three daily meals. The main meal in the 1800s, however, was not the large evening meal that is familiar to us today. Rather, it was a meal called dinner, enjoyed in the early afternoon. Supper was a smaller meal eaten in the evening.
Breakfast was served mid or late morning, and usually consisted of just ale and bread, with perhaps some cheese, cold meat or dripping. A lavish breakfast was often served by the nobility or gentry at social or ceremonial occasions such as weddings.
In the 13th century, breakfast when eaten sometimes consisted of a piece of rye bread and a bit of cheese. Morning meals would not include any meat, and would likely include 0.4 imperial gallons (1.8 L) of low alcohol-content beers. Uncertain quantities of bread and ale could have been consumed in between meals.
The oldest ears of popcorn ever found were discovered in the Bat Cave of west central New Mexico in 1948 and 1950. Ranging from smaller than a penny to about 2 inches, the oldest Bat Cave ears are about 5,600 years old.
What were the first flavors popcorn flavors people enjoyed? The first commercial popcorn may have been “sugared” or coated with molasses, but most was salted and buttered, much like the popcorn of today.
The first person to make popcorn did it accidentally when a kernel of corn ended up getting heated up by the sun to such a degree that it actually popped.