Armenian Corn

 This is story of Armenian corn, not to be confused
with American corn.  Our first night in Armenia, we ate dinner at the Mission Home.  The Mission President and his wife had only been in country a few weeks.  They served corn on the cob.  We thought it looked a little old.  We are used to corn being either really light yellow or white or both.  This corn was dark yellow, the way that it looks when you use it for a Halloween decoration.  It was so hard that you had to be careful not to break a tooth on it.

 We mentioned this to Suzi, out interpreter, some time later and she explained that Armenian corn must be cooked for about 3 hours.  We would call it field corn.  Apparently someone tried to introduce sweet corn, but the Armenians didn't like it.

The other day we drove a couple of hours to a small city almost on the Georgia border to look at a Kindergarten project.  Along the way, in the mountains we saw the corn sign.  We asked Erik, our driver, what it was and he told us that they were selling corn.  On the way back to Yerevan, we stopped at the sign of the corn.  We saw this young man with his pot of boiling water over a wood fire cooking corn.  Erik picked out a piece for each of us.  They don't put butter on it, which is surprising, because they put butter on almost everything else.  They just put a lot of salt on it.  

 Erik told the fellow that he wanted the most tender pieces. 










We really enjoyed it.  Erik thought it was a little mushy and we thought it was good.  Just goes to show that there is more than one way to cook an ear of corn.