Are you sure he did not say corn meal? Corn meal was used as a buffer and they claim that as it passed over the barrel it would do a light scraping of sorts on the way out. It acted as a buffer between the powder and the patched roundball and was supposed to increase accuracy. I have shot corn meal out of my rifles. I could not say it made a big difference but the birds seemed to like it.

Long ago they also used wasp nest from the Paper Wasp. These Wasps make a large nest usually within six feet of the ground and the hive itself is a paper like secretion from the bees and a mixture of the plants and elements in the area. (The old saying is the higher the nest was off the ground the more snow you can expect.. or is it the other way around? ) This also was used in the same setting as the corn meal.

I've never heard of the corn starch but have heard of many other things that people like to shoot out of the rifles. Now we make bore buttons or wonderwads as they are called out of 100% wool felt and then lubed with a bore butter type substance to keep it from burning when the charge is ignited. The bore buttons will protect the patched roundball in the barrel. They will also act as a buffer between powder charges and conical bullets. The old rule if thumb is if the conical has a flat base then you use a bore button. If the conical has a hollow base like the minnie ball, or the some of the Buffalo Bullet conicals or Hornedy Great Plains (I think they are hollow based) then the bore button would not be used. Yet we have a poster, Roskoe, that gets excellent results shooting the Great Plains with a sub base.

All you can do is try the different things and see if they work.