infection, when the galls on a single ear can
weigh as much as a pound/500 gm and are
about three-quarters black inside. When
cooked, these immature galls develop a sweet,
savory, woody flavor thanks to glucose,
sotolon, and vanillin. In the United States,
corn smut was simply a disease until the
1990s, when growing interest in Mexican food
led some farmers to cultivate it intentionally.
A related smut, U. esculenta, is eaten in
China and Japan. An Asian wild rice, Zizania
latifolia, develops the infection in its upper
stem, which swells with hyphae. The stems
are cooked and eaten as a vegetable (Chinese
kah-peh-sung, Japanese makomotake) whose
flavor is said to resemble bamboo shoots.
Mycoprotein, or Quorn
Mycoprotein is a 20th-century invention, an
edible form of the normally useless
underground hyphae of a common fungus,