People the world over have enjoyed popcorn for hundreds of years. Today, popcorn is seen as a recreational confection and not food and has entrenched itself in the moviegoers’ culture. One can almost not imagine settling in front of a movie screen without a bag of popcorn on the side.

Interestingly, popcorn was discovered by Native Americans thousands of years ago. They had thought the “pop” was that of an angry god escaping the corn kernel. Popcorn gained a lot of popularity during the Great Depression in America, because it was a very cheap food and afforded struggling farmers an opportunity to sell their corn.

Some strains of corn pop better than others, and a special kind of flint corn has now been cultivated, from which most types of popcorn is derived.

Popcorn can be popped at home in a pot on the stove with heated oil in it. A temperature of about 180 degrees Celsius must be reached before the kernel will burst and the foamy starch centre expand. Far easier, nowadays, is microwave popcorn that is packaged in special bags, complete with the requisite amount of oil and preferred flavouring.

Of course, on a larger scale, and for commercial use, special corn popping machines are available that can pop vast quantities of corn. These machines have existed for more than a century. The first ones were steam-driven, but before that, vendors had popped corn by holding a wire basket over a fire! The results were often unevenly popped and burnt corn.

Many types of flavouring are used with popcorn, like salt, cheese, salt & vinegar and many others. The most popular types of popcorn are salt and sweet, the latter called caramel corn.

Popcorn kernels normally pop into either of two types of flake: the butterfly flake of the mushroom flake. The mushroom flake is rounded and tougher and the preferred butterfly flake – so called because of the number of protruding butterfly-like “wings” – are more tender.

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