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Dinner, and a Snack, Too

Corn porridge called samp was a staple for both Indians and colonists

By Michele Ingrassia | Staff Writer

By the time Europeans landed, there were six varieties -- white, blue, red, yellow, orange and multicolor. ``It is the common food of all,'' Dutch settler Adriaen van der Donck observed. ``Young and old eat it; and they are so well accustomed to it, and fond of it, that when they visit our people, or each other, they consider themselves neglected unless they are treated with sappaen,'' or samp.

Plentiful, portable and nonperishable, corn quickly became critical to the settlers, who added European touches -- salted beef, shellfish, herbs -- to the Indians' fare. ``If it were not for corn, the settlers could not have gone across the nation building a country,'' says Long Island food historian Alice Ross. Ironically, she says, it was wheat that the Dutch and English had expected to sustain them. But they soon realized that the wheat seeds they brought from the Connecticut River Valley would take years to cultivate.

Of course, before the hard corn could be eaten it had to be processed. And in the days before windmills, the Indians crafted a ``samp pounder,'' an oversized mortar and pestle, to do the work. The mortar was fashioned from a three-foot tree stump that was seared and scraped until a 12- to 15-inch cavity was hollowed out. The spring pole to maneuver the pestle came from a nearby sapling, bent and poised over the mortar. The pestle itself was a long, heavy stick, rounded at the end and fastened to the spring pole.

To soften the corn, kernels were soaked overnight in water and lye -- or hot ashes -- then rinsed, dried and brought to the pounder. Particularly among the settlers, autumn Saturdays on Long Island were samp days, when villagers would cart their kernels to a central mortar, the thump, thump, thumping lasting into the early candlelight.

``There were a great many myths to go with the pounders,'' says Ross. ``One holds that, if sailors were coming into Long Island at night or in the fog and didn't want their ship destroyed on the rocks, they would listen for the sound of corn being pounded.''

Though the settlers took many recipes from the Indians, none was more important than the recipe for samp porridge, a heavy, stick-to-the-ribs corn, bean and meat stew. On its own, it was an everyday breakfast, lunch or dinner -- even a snack in a pre-Doritos world. With salted beef, it was a Sabbath supper.

Most often, though, samp was a movable feast: Started on Saturday, it would simmer on the hearth all week, altered day by day with a bit of meat here, a drop of shellfish there. No one got bored. ``By the end of the week, a popcornflavored crust had formed around the pot,'' Ross says. ``Each family member would try to lift out the whole shell without breaking it, and whoever did got a special privilege.''

Though corn myths have faded, and you won't find samp on any four-star menu, corn remains quintessential Long Island fare -- albeit again more luxury than staple. Annually, says Bill Sanok of the Cornell Cooperative Extension in Riverhead, the Island grows about 18 million ears of sweet corn, each one meant to be picked and eaten before the summer sun goes down.

Developed about a century ago, that delicate corn has nothing in common with the coarse, flinty food that sustained centuries of Indians and settlers. True, a hard-kerneled crop remains, but the yield is barely 3 million ears per year. What becomes of it? ``It's used,'' Sanok says, ``for feeding animals.''