Acorns

I thought it might be an idea to sweep all the leaves - mainly oak leaves - off the back of the back lawn before it rains, dry sweeping being much less like hard work and doing much less damage to what it left of the grass than wet sweeping. About two wheel barrows worth. Along the way I was entertained by the steady dropping of acorns, with their distinctive thud as they hit the hard ground. And thought to myself that maybe they should be harvested. So I gathered a few and went indoors to consult with Dorothy Hartley.

The best she can offer is cutting wheat flour with acorn flour in times of famine, feeding pigs with them and making rather unpleasant coffee. However, I then turn a few pages to read about earth nuts, otherwise pig nuts, a hazel nut sized (Borges-Chinese) relative of the truffle which can be eaten raw. Apparently, at one time, the Irish thought of using them as food in a serious way.

The accompanying picture in the book, that is to say not the one above, also talks of Buniun flexuousum, which Google (but not Bing) runs down to reference 3 as an alternate name for Conopodium majus. Shakespeare knew about them as, in Act.II Scene.II of 'The Tempest' he has Caliban tell Stephano: '... And I with my long nails will dig thee pignuts...'. We must try and find some of these things in the wild. Bit of a pain to harvest though, with the nuts being a good way down.

Then a few pages after that she writes of the Hafod, or summer farm, once common in mountain districts. Where I read that a crone is an old ewe, past breeding age. From which we presumably take old crone and crony. I also read that, up on their mountain pastures, the summer farmers ate a lot of oat cakes, recently noticed at reference 4, as they kept better than bread. A mountain version of the ships' biscuits known to Captain Hornblower. As it happened, I rather liked the oat cakes and BH is now getting the Sainsbury's own brand, which I like even better. Not quite as dry on the palate.

Next stop, with Bing on the laptop, where I learn that acorns are indeed eaten by humans. Orgo-woodland humans in the US that is. The good news is that acorns are highly nutritious and an oak tree produces lots of them. The peoples of the First Nations used to eat lots of them. The bad news is that acorns vary a good deal from oak to oak - there being lots of different sorts of oak trees - and that they need to be processed in order to be eaten. In particular to have the tannins leached out of them, not lethal but not very palatable either. One also needs to avoid the worms which appear to infest them. Mostly it looks as if acorns are ground down to a coarse flour which can be used in much the same way as oat meal.

And if you have culinary pretensions, you might care for wood duck with acorn dumplings. I learn that ducks very a good deal too - but that wood ducks seem to be reliable.

Which well may be so, but my acorns are now on their way to the kitchen waste bucket, en route to the small compost heap, the one not presently troubled by foxes. Although I do remember that, in the bad old days when we fed this compost heap with meat as well as vegetable waste and when it had a cover to keep the foxes out, we were troubled with rats.

PS 1: I have now checked with OED. It seems that crone (sheep), crone (old women, less often old man) and crony have different roots. The first is Middle Dutch, the second Old Northern French and the last unknown, but unrelated. OED also points out that we sometimes talk of a man as being a right old woman, providing some support for that use of crone.

PS 2: and in the margins I have learned the ships' biscuits are also known as hard tack and were known to the legionaries of Rome.

PS 3: deciphering the phrase 'Borges-Chinese' used above is left as an exercise for readers.

References

Reference 1: Food in England - Dorothy Hartley - 1954.

Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2009/08/lampreyland.html.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conopodium_majus.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/08/the-wallace.html.