"Nixtamalized corn flour"

Lessons in language and chemistry at the supermarket.

If you like serendipity along with bargains when you shop for groceries, you’ll love Grocery Outlet, the Emeryville, California–based retailer whose unimaginative name belies a weird wonderland of discounted overstocks, closeouts, second-tier household and grooming products, and close-to-expiration and/or rebranded foodstuffs. One of the most popular aisles in the stores is called NOSH, a Yiddish word meaning “snack” but which at the GrossOut, as we devotees fondly call it, stands for Natural, Organic, Specialty, and Healthy. Did you see something appealing today — say, pints of Snoop Dogg’s Dr. Bombay ice cream¹ for 99 cents each? Then do not hesitate to buy it, because it probably will be gone tomorrow.

Grocery Outlet stores are independently owned and tend to reflect the buying preferences of local residents. In Oakland, California, where I live, that means plenty of products favored by shoppers with Mexican and Central American roots. Earlier this week, one of those products stopped me in my tracks.

Masienda heirloom blue corn masa harina (nixtamalized corn flour). Love the elegant packaging.

I hadn’t been looking for masa harina, but the combination of the Masienda brand name and the word “nixtamalized” — both new to me — was too intriguing to ignore.

Masienda was founded in Los Angeles in 2014; according to the website’s Our Story page, the company name is a blend of masa (dough made from ground corn) and tienda (store or shop). It’s a good portmanteau that also suggests, and rhymes with, hacienda (a large estate). In addition to the blue corn masa harina I saw at G.O., Masienda sells yellow, white, and red masa harina as well as ready-made tortillas, a tortilla starter kit, and a molcajete, a traditional mortar and pestle made from lava rock. Molcajete — a portmanteau of words for “sauce” and “bowl” — is a Nahuatl word, Nahuatl being the language spoken by ancient Aztecs and still used by about a million people in Mesoamerica.

Nahuatl may be a minor language today, but historically it’s had an outsize influence on both Spanish and English vocabulary. Among our Nahuatl borrowings are tomato, coyote, avocado, chocolate, chili, and ocelot. And also, strange as it seems, nixtamalize.

The word may have been new to me, but it’s been around for some time.² Part Nahuatl, part Latin, it’s an odd, fascinating hybrid — or Frankenword, as former Boston Globe language columnist Jan Freeman once called this type of coinage.³

The stem is nixtamal, from Nahuatl nextli (ashes, cinders) + tamal-li (bread made of steamed corn meal — yes, the same tamal as in tamale.) Those Aztecs sure loved their portmanteau words.

The OED tracks the English-language use of nixtamal back to 1896 and defines it as “maize [what Americans call corn] kernels which have been boiled and steeped in an alkaline solution (usually lime water) in order to remove the hulls, used to make masa.” (Masa is Spanish, not Nahuatl; it comes from Latin massa, a mass.) How to pronounce nixtamal? The x is /sh/ in Spanish, /ks/ in English. Take your pick.

At some point after 1896 — this is where my research has failed me — someone grafted the Latin suffix -ize onto nixtamal to describe the steeping-in-alkaline process. (I suppose it’s -ise in British English; the OED is no help here.) And from there we graduated to nixtimalization and full Latinahuatl.

By the way, the chemistry of nixtimalization is even more complicated than the etymology. America’s Test Kitchen did an extremely deep dive back in 2016; here’s an excerpt:

Corn is naturally abundant in niacin (aka vitamin B3), which is an essential part of the human diet. However, the niacin in corn is chemically bound to other molecules, so we humans cannot properly absorb it. If you try to subsist on a diet based around nothing but corn prepared without alkaline treatment, you will develop niacin deficiency—which, it turns out, is pellagra.

Somehow, though, prehistoric Mesoamericans took advantage of the way that cooking corn in an alkaline solution frees the bound niacin, shifts the balance of proteins, and turns corn into a nutritionally complete staple food. Ken Albala is director of food studies at the University of the Pacific and a historian of food. How nixtamalization first happened, he says, “is not recorded anywhere. There’s no way to tell the date. You can’t really pound corn, and it’s hard to mill. Someone wondered, ‘How do you soften it?’ Someone used limestone or burnt shells or wood ash, and the people who figured out how to do it, they survived.”

One additional linguistic note from my shopping expedition. Harina is the Spanish word for finely ground corn (maize) flour, but its Latin source, farina, usually applies to wheat flour. (Far was a Latin word for wheat or a related grain, spelt; compare farro, a whole grain that comes from three species of wheat.) When Latin was localized in what is now Spain, many words beginning with f were changed to h- words in which the h went silent: facere (to do, to make) became hacer, fumo (smoke) became humo, farina became harina. Meanwhile, Italian maintained the f in farina.

And so did English. In English, lower-case farina is a generic term for milled wheat, and capital-F Farina has been a brand of “hot wheat cereal” (no corn!) since it was introduced by Pillsbury in 1898, right around the time nixtamal found its way into English. The brand was sold to Malt-O-Meal in 2009.

Farina Mills fortified farina, a linguistic relative of harina.

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A housekeeping note: Next Thursday is U.S. Thanksgiving, which translates to a four-day weekend. I’ll be publishing just one newsletter next week, my November linkstack. (Here’s the October version.) Post-holiday fare will include my annual words-of-the-year post. Got a nomination? Leave a comment. For reference, here’s last year’s WOTY list.

1. I can’t vouch for the other flavors, but Fo’ Shizzle Almond Fudge is excellent.

2. How long? I haven’t been able to answer that question.

3. The Globe column is 404’d; the (gift) link goes to a 2012 Atlantic article that cites it. Coined words that blend two discrete languages have been irritating some pedants for decades; C.S. Lewis famously hated television, which combines Greek tele- (far) with Latin -vision (sight).