cold flour

Cold flour is a regional American term for parched cornmeal — dried, roasted corn ground into a coarse powder that could be eaten dry or mixed with water without cooking. A practical travel food used by Native Americans and frontier settlers, it kept well and needed no fire. Largely historical, most often encountered in 19th-century frontier accounts and foraging literature. It carries connotations of rugged self-sufficiency and austere subsistence living.