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SONG TITLE: 'ACORNS KEEP FALLING ON MY DECK'
Acorns have been keeping me awake at night.
I could write a song about it. Burt Bacharach wrote the perfect tune back in the late '60s -- Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head. My song will go "Acorns keep falling on my deckÖ"
A mature oak tree produces about 5,000 acorns annually, with a bumper crop every 3 or 4 years. This must be the year of the bumper crop. I have six giant bur oak trees around my house and every night the trees drop their acorns onto my deck and onto the metal roof of my woodshed. Talk about a racket. It sounds like the acorns are being fired from a gun.
It's hard to believe that these six giant oak trees began their life a century ago from acorns dropped from former oaks in this same space.
"When one considers how oaks reproduce," writes naturalist David Rains Wallace, "simply by dropping on the ground a large seed that half the animals in the neighborhood would like to eat, it seems a bit miraculous that trees of the genus Quercus have survived as long as they have."
In the book "Red Oaks & Black Birches," by Rebecca Rupp, I read about a study that tracked the fates of some 15,000 acorns dropped from a single spectacularly prolific oak. Of these, 83% were gobbled up by deer, squirrels and other animals; 6% were attached by weevils and insect larvae; and 10% were "naturally imperfect." Less than 1% actually sprouted and of those, over half died as seedlings.
Most oaks begin bearing acorns by about 10 years of age. Acorns, like beechnuts, hazelnuts and sweet chestnuts, are true nuts -- botanically, one-seeded fruits with a hard, woody outer layer corresponding to the flesh of culinary fruits.
Most of the other munchies included in Christmas mixed-nut bowls, writes Rupp, are, botanically speaking, not nuts at all. Almonds, walnuts, pecans and hickory nuts are all surrounded by a fleshy layer while on the tree and as such as the equivalents of the stones of drupe fruits, like peaches and plums.
Brazil nuts, which really do come from Brazil, are officially seeds: 12 to 20 individual "nuts" are borne in clusters packed within woody pods about 6 inches in diameter.
Although Indians utilized acorns as a food staple, food historian Waverley Root states that acorns "are best eaten indirectly by man in the form of pork," a reference to the fondness for acorns by farm pigs when pigs were commonly raised on pasture "back in the good old days." Today few hogs find their way outdoors and off concrete floors.
Rupp writes that acorns can be an excellent source of nutrients in the human diet. Like most nuts, they are good sources of protein and B vitamins. Containing only 5% fat (compared with 59% fat in walnuts), acorns contain 68% carbohydrate.
The problem with acorns, from a dietary standpoint, is that most are either rather bland or mouth-puckering bitter. The bland varieties -- generally termed "sweet" -- are produced on trees from the white oak family. Trees from the red oak family produce acorns that are usually bitter due to their tannin content.
David Bainbridge, a plant researcher and acorn enthusiast from Riverside, California, has teamed up with acorn-tasting volunteers to discover the ideal acorn. He reports that he has tracked down some markedly flavorful varieties, described as having overtones of chocolate and cashew. Some are sweet enough to be roasted and eaten like chestnuts, according to Bainbridge.
Some of you will remember Euell Gibbons, the naturalist from several decades ago who advocated eating natural foods. He is quoted as saying "even unleached acorns of some species are worth the attention of someone who is really hungry." Members of his camping party didn't agree, however, and couldn't stomach acorns until they were leached, roasted and dipped in clarified sugar.
If you have got a bumper crop of acorns this year, you may want to consider this recipe for acorn coffee from a family receipt book from 1819: "Take sound and ripe acorns, peel off the shell or husk, divide the kernels, dry them gradually, and roast them in a close vessel or roaster, keeping them continually stirring; in doing which special care must be taken that they be not burnt or roasted too much, both which would be hurtful.
"Take of these roasted acorns (ground like other coffee) half an ounce every other morning and evening, alone mixed with a dram of other coffee, and sweetened with sugar, with or without milk.
"This receipt is recommended by a famous German physician, as a much esteemed, wholesome, nourishing, strengthening nutriment for mankind; which, by its medicinal qualities, has been found to cure slimy obstructions in the viscera, and to remove nervous complaints when other medicines have failed."
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PUTTING DOWN ROOTS:
A Delightful Blend of
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