Tainan Houbi Puffed Rice Crackers, the Good Taste of Traditional Rice Crackers

I still remember being back home in Wang'an as a child - kids being kids, we were always pestering the grown-ups for snacks. Back then there were no FamilyMarts or farmers' association supermarkets on Wang'an Island, only a handful of tiny general stores scattered across the villages. Without a local to guide you, an outside visitor probably would not even find them. What is more, these little shops were run haphazardly by an assortment of aunts and uncles from the various families, and what they sold and when they opened was entirely up to the whim of the adults - during the midday nap hours, you could be sure no one would open up for you to patronize.

My first encounter with the popcorn ball happened on just such a disheartening afternoon. I still remember clutching a 5-yuan coin in my hand, standing frozen for a long while in front of the locked-up general store run by the woman I was "supposedly supposed to call Great-Aunt," unable to buy the chicken-flavored instant noodles I had been longing for. In the end I had no choice but to walk home with a tearful face, and the moment my family saw that something was off, they hurriedly stuffed a big, hard popcorn ball into my hands.

Yes, "hard as a rock" was my first impression of the popcorn ball. Starch-packed popcorn, glued into a ball by syrup, each one fully half the size of my face - no matter how wide I opened my mouth, it was hard to bite off even one mouthful. It really was an awkward food: it had neither the fresh sweetness of boiled corn nor the crisp lightness of movie-theater popcorn. So for me, the popcorn ball was always a food of last resort. You can imagine how astonished I was later on when I tasted crisp, buttery popcorn.

It is all popcorn - so why such a big difference?

It turns out this has to do with the type of corn. The corn used for food around the world can be divided mainly into seven types: dent corn, flint corn, sweet corn, flour corn, waxy corn, popcorn, and wild pod corn. Dent corn is used mainly as feed in the United States; sweet corn is eaten fresh or canned; waxy corn is mostly made into cornstarch and is an important industrial crop. As the English name "pop corn" for popcorn tells us, this is the corn best suited to making popcorn, while flint corn is a staple food in Central and South America - the famous Mexican tortilla chips are made from flint corn.

The difference in how much different corns pop when heated comes mainly from the starch they contain. The kernels of dent corn and sweet corn are composed mainly of soft starch and have a higher moisture content, so when heated they only gelatinize or carbonize rather than pop. Sweet corn needs no further explanation: its kernels have very high moisture and sugar content - you have surely never heard of anyone roasting corn into popcorn, right?

But popcorn and flint corn are different. These two corns are mainly wrapped in hard starch, with only a little soft starch around the outer edge of the germ. When the kernel is heated, the soft starch with its higher moisture content expands rapidly, and when the pressure is great enough, it goes "pop!" and bursts open the outer layer of hard starch. And because popcorn has a little less hard starch than flint corn, it can pop in a shorter time and pops more completely, which makes it easy to produce delicious popcorn.

So which kind of corn was used for the popcorn balls I ate back then? Curious, I frantically leafed through my textbook–

"……The corn varieties cultivated in Taiwan in the early period were mostly naturally pollinated varieties introduced from abroad. The main ones included mountain red and deep red dent corn and red flint corn, introduced from the mainland or by the Dutch about 200 to 300 years ago; and Tainan white and light red dent corn and white flint corn, introduced from Japan about 80 years ago."

Since dent corn does not turn into popcorn, what I ate as a child must have been flint corn - the truth is finally out! Flipping through my food crops textbook, I suddenly remembered that cheeky children's rhyme: "The bride is so pretty, a hole in her underpants, popcorn on the back wall." Only after growing up did I learn that in the early years, when life was hard and food was difficult to produce, the popcorn ball was in fact a rare festive treat for young men and women at their weddings. This popcorn ball, which for me was merely a food of last resort, was actually the wedding candy that my grandparents gave to relatives and friends before their marriage.

Nowadays, with trade so convenient, popcorn ball shops have begun using imported, crisp and tasty popcorn to make their popcorn balls, and it has become a well-known specialty of Wang'an. But in my grandmother's heart, the popcorn balls made from flint corn were surely the most delicious of all.