The most traditional American food may well be cornmeal.  Cornmeal, as we know it

today, began as an Indian staple.  The American Indians grew corn of six different colors – black, red,

white, yellow, blue, and multicolored.  They ground the corn kernels into cornmeal and mixed it with

salt and water, then baked it.  This recipe was introduced to the early colonists, who experimented

with it and developed their own uses of cornmeal.  Succotash, a meat stew with cornmeal added, and

mush, leftover cornmeal porridge cut and fried, are two meals invented by early colonists.

   Visitors can travel to the South and enjoy spoonbread, a smooth puddinglike dish, or to New

England for johnnycakes, a kind of flat pancake.  But probably the most common forms of cornmeal

Nationwide are cornbread, cornmeal muffins, and the “hushpuppy,” a round ball of cornmeal batter

that is fried in oil.

According to the passage, cornmeal was originally used by