Tale Of Two Acorns

It was the biggest of acorns, it was the smallest of acorns...

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These two acorns are from the same "species" of oak.  I love how books like Oaks of North America try to give, for each species, a range of the number of acorns per KG (in the case of one of these it's more like acorn per KG)  When the range spans 3 or 4 orders of magnitude it starts to become somewhat unhelpful in identifying or classifying a given species.

I've said before and I'll keep saying it.  We've had 6,000 years to turn corn into the planet killing soil wrecker it has become.  Just think if we had devoted 1/1,000,000th of that time and energy into selectively breeding oaks for food production!  Give me this kind of genetic variation and 6,000 years and I'll give you acorns the size of watermelons that tap dance and whistle Dixie.

Acorn Flour Made

Well, I got the leached acorns dried and ground (in a coffee grinder - worked great although I'm a little concerned it might have dulled the blades a bit) into a fine meal/flour.

Cookies, sadly, will have to wait until tomorrow.

The flour taste great, although I wish I had leached the acorns for a little longer.  There's still a slight tannin aftertaste - like a great Shiraz.  Also like your tongue is a hide in the process of being tanned.
Again these are sawtooth oak (Q. acutissima) acorns that we're told are very bitter despite being the mast equivalent of crack cocaine for wild turkeys and deer.  Euell Gibbons, in Stalking the Wild Asparagus*, talks about boiling his acorns for 2 hours, and those were chestnut oaks (which he calls Quercus muehlenbergii, so either old Euell got his common name or his Latin name goofed up - probably common name since another name for chinkapin oak - the true Q muehlenbergii - is rock chestnut oak), a "sweet" acorn.

That's OK, come cookie baking time I'll compensate by adding a pinch of extra sugar.  One time, and for some reason I cannot possibly fathom, I was watching a cooking show with that old Cajun dude Justin Whathisname.  He was pouring cooking wine into a measuring cup over pot when he winked at the camera and said, "Whoops, missed dee cup."  That's how I am with sugar in cookies.

* Yes, I will return your book soon... I promise!

Acorns Leached

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Last night I boiled the sawtooth acorn kernels.  Unlike Euell Gibbons who recommends doing so for two hours, I actually wanted to get to bed at some point, so I boiled them for about 1 hour, swapping the water every 10 minutes or so.

The first two or three times the water turned the color of Lutheran potluck dinner coffee, then more of a latte color, then a very light milky tan.

As I said, I probably should have done it at least a couple more times, but got lazy.  Still, the acorns have lost 95% of their original bitterness, and have a creamy, cashew-like flavor - which is to say they taste great.

And Euell was right when he said, "The acorns turned a dark chocolate brown and were without a trace of their former bitterness and astringency."

The plan is to roast some whole in the oven, salted and unsalted, and grind the rest and dry it for flour.

More later.

Acorns Shelled

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I spent part of last evening shelling sawtooth oak (Quercus acutissima) acorns with my son.  My method: Crack the shell with a garlic press and then peel by hand.  His preferred method: Smash the acorn with a meat tenderizer, then sort out the fragments.  His way looked like more fun (until it came time to clean up, when he disappeared faster than Houdini).  On an unrelated note, does anyone know how to remove acorn shell fragments from under thumbnails?

Tonight they will be boiled to leach out the tannins, dried and ground into meal.  Tomorrow they will be cookies.  Tomorrow night my short term memory will stop deteriorating.  Friday morning I will still forget to put out the garbage.

Many Forest Service and other academic/governmental bulletins in the USA state that sawtooth oak acorns are very bitter.  Those same bulletins, however, state that the acorns are highly valued by wildlife, especially wild turkeys and whitetail deer.  In the meantime, Koreans are clearly eating sawtooth acorns by the truckload.  Something doesn't add up.

My suspicion is that this is a bit of arboreal xenophobia; sawtooth oak is an exotic and potentially invasive species.  While acknowledging its benefits for wildlife (because not to do so would be to lose all credibility) the authors of these bulletins don't want to encourage the planting and potential naturalization of sawtooth oak.

But that's an issue for another day.  The issue for today (or at least tomorrow): cookies!

Morris NNGA Address, Part 2

To continue where I left off from Robert T. Morris's address in the Northern Nut Growers Association 1929 annual report:

My friend, Dr. B. L. McClellan of Xenia, Ohio, sent on some acorns from Yellow Springs in his state. He said that they were not only highly prized by pigs and fowls but that he had eaten them roasted and boiled and found them to be particularly good.  I went out to Yellow Springs (remember, Morris was from New York City) and looked over the oak tree.  It was a narrow leafed chestnut oak (Quercus muehlenbergii).  (OK, hold the phone here.  I know it's a complete shocker to run into an issue of taxonomy and nomenclature in an article on oaks, but chestnut oak is Q. prinus and Q. muehlengergii is of course chinkapin oak - or chinquapin oak depending on your feeling about the letter q.  Could it be that Mr. Morris had two species confused?  Or, more likely, could it be that at that time the two "species" were considered to be, as they should be, the same species? I need to look into this a little farther.)  Other trees of the species grew in the vicinity. There were few chestnuts in that vicinity (and within a few decades there would, of course, be zero chestnuts in the vicinity) and the fruit from this narrow leafed oak took the place of chestnuts for pigs, fowls and boys. (But apparently not for girls - although it's more reflective of that wonderful time when we didn't fracture our prose with slashes - s/he and boy/girl - simply to avoid offense.)

I began to look into the question more deeply... Some of us older members remember perhaps to have seen a hundred thousand wild pigeons sweep into an oak hillside, these to be followed by another hundred thousand and another.  We hardly realized the enormous number of tons of acorns that were being picked up by the wild pigeons.  Oak trees are adapted to a very wide variety of soils, in fact, I do not know that we hvae any soils that bear trees of any kind which will not grow some of the more than fifty species of oak trees and shrubs which are indigenous to this country.  Many kinds can be raised upon the prairies where there are now no trees.  The prairies were treeless in the past because of fires rather than because the soil was not adapted to hardwood growth.

Think I'll stop here to cover a couple of interesting (at least to me) points.

1. I presume he's talking about the passenger pigeon, which once formed flocks so huge they blocked out the sun until market hunting brought it to extinction.  Those flocks, it seems, are another example of people seeing a natural phenomena or state of being and assuming that it was always the case.  Many have instead speculated that those massive flocks of passenger pigeons were anything but natural.  Once hunted heavily by Native Americans, those flocks exploded in size when European diseases took a massive toll on Indian populations.  It would be interesting to know, in turn, how those unnaturally high populations of passenger pigeons affected oak and chestnut regeneration and the availability of food for other species of wildlife.

2. Morris here demonstrates an understanding that landscapes are not fixed or static - an understanding I find in other writing of that time, from Aldo Leopold to J. Russell Smith, but which seems to have been lost to a great degree today, when all changes in cover type are attributed to global warming.  Morris looks out over the vast prairie of the American Midwest and sees not a perma-prairie, but a landscape forged by fire (both natural and, just as often, human-caused), a landscape that could support trees that could in turn feed the nation.

If it was a question of ripping out big bluestem to plant oaks even I would be hard pressed to advocate this idea.  But since it's now mostly a question of replacing corn, wheat and soybeans, I think turning the prairie over to trees - oak trees - is a brilliant idea.

People much smarter in 1927 than 2011

Reader David Olsen has been kind enough to send excerpts of publications of the Northern Nut Growers Association from the 1920's - an address given by J. Russell Smith in 1924 and the annual report from 1927.

To the extent that any of this material was ever under copyright I doubt it is any more, and even if it was this information is so important - if it was true then it is 100 times more true (if indeed it's possible for something to be "more true") today - that I doubt anyone would object to me reprint huge chunks of it in their entirety.

Original text is in bold.  My comments are in italics.

Robert T. Morris was a friend and correspondant of J. Russell Smith and is quoted - or at least referenced - in Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture.

EDIBLE ACORNS AS FOOD FOR MAN, LIVESTOCK AND FOWLS
By Robert T. Morris, New York City

Most of us have had a sort of general knowledge about acorns without thought of their potential in the way of future food supply.  It was only when my interest happened to become engaged in a special way that the subject began to expand rapidly and I soon found that a whole lifetime could be devoted to this one subject.  (You don't say...)  The situation was very much like that in which the German professor found himself when he suddenly realized that he had wasted a lifetime on verbs when he should have given all effort to concentration upon the dative case.  (I can't think of anything more tragic.  Actually I hope that studying acorns isn't anything like that at all.  And since I had no idea either...)

The subject of acorns for food supply has remained in the background for the reason that farmers are now producing so much more food than we can use that they do not know what to do with the over-supply.  Farmer are trying all sorts of quack methods for relief in order to escape from a situation which they have brought upon themselves.  (It is now 84 years later and they still are, although I should say it's a chicken/egg issue: are farmers growing too much grain because of the perverse system of incentives provided by the government, or is the perverse system of incentives in place to rescue farmers who can't stop growing too much grain?)  The next move, it seems to me, will not be so much in the way of finding new food supplies but rather the cheapening of those which we already have.  (See also: high fructose corn syrup)  Cheapening of the ones we already have will occur when the expense of labor and tillage of the soil for the raising of annual crops will diminish and we then turn to subsoil crops which avoid the expense of tillage and labor.

Acorns already belong to tree crops which are utilized largely as food for livestock and fowls and in many parts of the world they constitute a basic food supply for man.  It is only recently that the screw point of my interest in acorns became engaged in thread of the subject.  (I love that little turn of a phrase... get it?)

To see where the screw point of Robert T. Morris's interest led him, tune in to the next episode of "As The Acorn Turns."

What Is Native? Ongoing, half-baked musings on "native" versus exotic trees

I grew up in the Minneapolis suburbs, but I have spent much of my “adult” life in two different small upper Midwest towns: Baraboo, WI and Northfield, MN. Baraboo is home to the International Crane Foundation, which absolutely everyone should visit someday. It’s an amazing place which has accomplished amazing things, on land close to Aldo Leopold’s Sand County farm.

Shortly after moving to Baraboo I gave my visiting brother in law a driving tour of the town. As we circled the old-fashioned town square I said,

“Every Thursday on the square we have…”

“Hangin’s?” he interrupted, in an exaggerated drawl.

“No, smart ass, those are Mondays at noon. I was going to say concerts.”

I currently reside in Northfield, MN which is famous (in its own collective mind) as the last place where the James & Younger gang tried – and failed – to rob the bank, six minutes of drama which is faithfully reenacted the first weekend after Labor Day every year.

The two towns are similar in several respects: both are old river mill towns, both have smallmouth bass populations skilled at avoiding my lures. But one similarity is particularly striking: The way locals give directions to disoriented strangers.

“Yah, okay, you take this road to where Betty’s Diner used to be, and you take a right.”

“You know where the Casey’s used to be? Yah, turn left there.”

And the stranger is thinking, You idiot, if I knew enough about this Podunk town to know where Betty’s Diner used to be I wouldn’t be asking you for directions.  It occurred to me that we sometimes think of the landscape the way small town locals think of their towns: In terms of what used to be there.

Central Minnesota? Yah, that’s where the paper birches used to be before their range started shifted north in response to Global Warming.

But clinging to what we remember – to the way things used to be – is not a very instructive or helpful way (and can, in fact, be a dangerously limiting way) to understand our natural world, and is especially not a very instructive way to think about the concept of “native” plants.

Aldo Leopold, in A Sand County Almanac, tells us how his land changed cover type dozens if not hundreds of times over the years, as the forest moved south only to be pushed back north by the prairie.

Is the climate warming? Probably. Is it due, at least in part, to human activity? Quite possibly. But the fact is the climate is always in a state of change, which means by definition it is always either warming or cooling, and the landscape is constantly changing in response.

Add to that the fact that no landscape is static; landscapes follow an inexorable successional march from a ‘pioneer’ landscape to a mature or ‘climax’ landscape, only to experience a major disturbance or change (often fire, often human caused in an attempt to manage and influence the landscape) and start all over again.

So what is native? The answer seemed simple to me 25 years ago in forestry school (a lot of things seemed simple to be 25 years ago). Now I’m not so sure.

What is native? Hawaii has vegetation. (Think about it.)

What is native? My son enjoys looking through and sketching birds in the Sibley Guide which has a section on European “accidentals.” Birds sometimes cover unfathomable distances, disoriented or blown by storms. And when they do they no doubt plant some exotic and invasive seeds on that foreign ground before trying to figure out where they are, how they got there, and where they can get a proper cup of tea or a suitable croissant.

What is native? Despite repeated archaeological finds that tell us humans of thousands of years ago travelled and traded across vast distances, we seem to express surprise each time another such finding is published. Regardless of the merit of his scientific theories, the minute Thor Heyerdahl’s Ra II landed in Barbados it probably deposited totora seeds on the shore. How did totora get to Easter Island? Was it birds (as most scientists theorize) or South American travelers as Heyerdahl conjectured? Either way, at one point it was an invasive.

What is native?  The place where I am now sitting was, not that long ago, covered in ice.  Actually that was only two weeks ago.  But what I meant was that it was covered by a massive glacier year round.  Whereas now it's only nine months per year.

OK, I better get back to work. And a bottle of my second favorite tree crop (and John Adams’ favorite), hard cider, is also calling my name on this Friday afternoon.

Oh, and if you’re ever in Northfield, look me up. I’m not far from where the Ole Store used to be.