Every fall while I was growing up, my mother would pull out a curved, cone-shaped wicker basket and stuff it with fake plastic fruit. There was no corn inside, just some squishy grapes that squeaked if you popped them in your mouth and chewed. They did not taste like grapes, they didn’t even taste purple, they tasted like dust and motor oil from being in the garage. (you’re laughing, really? I bet if I asked your mother, she’d tell me you ate dog food!)
I get the idea of plenty. Most American immigrants came here because there wasn’t enough to go around back in their homeland. Prairies filled with buffalo, woods filled with game and the skies filled with fowl must have seemed like a gastronomic paradise.
But is there a deeper meaning?
Because in my mind, that cornucopia actually was a talisman–a prayer that there would be enough food to feed the family through the winter and spring until fresh food could again be harvest from the Earth.
So I decided to do a little digging.
First the horn shape. Apparently Zeus had to be hidden from his father (so he wouldn’t eat the future king of the gods). He was suckled by a goat goddess and accidentally broke of one of her horns. A horn that provided unending nourishment, in a my horn runneth over kind of way. Of course, this isn’t the only mythology associated with the horn. There are plenty of others, but the horn is always a symbol of a bountiful harvest.
As for filling the horn with fruit, grains, etc, I can’t find out when that started. But I do know that corn was placed in the cornucopia after the settling of the New World by Europeans.
So, there’s as much corn in a cornucopia as you can stuff into it:-)