"Beef and Corn" Really? Corn wasn't in Europe until after the Americas were discovered.
So yes, corn existed in Europe long before Columbus.
Romans would not have gone out for corn, though. They had the word 'granum', from which we derived 'grain'.
The use of the word "corn" to refer exclusively to maize and not other cereal grains is a quirk of North American English that apparently has also spread to Oceania, but is not shared by much of the rest of the English-speaking world.