On Food and Cooking

outer pericarp, or hull. Early corn eaters
developed a special pretreatment to ease the
removal of the hull, which is called
nixtamalization (from an Aztec word): they
cooked the kernels in water made alkaline
with a variety of substances. The Mayas and
Aztecs used ashes or lime; North American
tribes, ashes and naturally occurring sodium
carbonate deposits; and a contemporary
Mayan group burns mussel shells for the same
purpose. One of the major glue-like
components of plant cells walls,
hemicellulose, is especially soluble in
alkaline conditions. Nixtamalization softens
the hull and partly detaches it from the rest of
the kernel so that it can be rubbed off and
washed away. It also helps transform the
kernels into a cohesive dough for making
tortillas and other preparations (see below),
and it releases much of their bound niacin so
that we can absorb and benefit from it.