Hickory nuts are among the rarest foodstuffs, yet they grow all around us in southern New England. You can’t find them in the baking or produce department of a supermarket among the almonds, walnuts, and pecans, or in the snack food aisle beside the cashews, Brazil nuts, and pistachios. Most people have hardly heard of them, or wonder if they are edible. Although you can bake with them, foraging food guru Euell Gibbons found few better for eating right out of the shell.
No truer taste of a tree can be had than in a hickory nut. Buttery, with a hint of caramel, the meats are at the intersection of commercial walnuts and pecans in flavor, but somehow more powerful, richer. They seem to suggest the strength and potency of the wood itself, dense with BTUs as firewood, strong and flexible enough for tool handles and baseball bats that take continual punishment.
Toward the end of September, just as the trees’ distinctive three terminal leaflets were yellowing, I spent a few hours in bright sunshine gathering hickory nuts. Next year I’ll get an earlier start as the squirrels had been to the groves of shaggy barked trunks well before me and taken the best for themselves. Even so, my wife Mary and my naturalist friend Jay took the side of the bushy-tailed creatures and warned me to leave sufficient numbers behind.
I started at the edge of a wooded ravine among a few pignut hickories with their acorn sized nuts. The nut husks are generally green with blackish brown mottling. Sometimes the tan nuts, slightly flattened and sporting ridges, have shed their husks. Scattered in the
As the law of diminishing returns became more strictly enforced, I made my way to a grove of shagbark hickories growing at the edge of an old field. As large as golf balls in their husks, these are a squirrel delicacy so the pickings were slim. Empty hulls littered the ground where the arboreal rodents had been feasting. Still, I manage several handfuls by fumbling through tall grass and brush. The freshly dropped ones glowed like emeralds, often nestled in weeds like eggs in a nest.
Rarely consumed by locals today, Native Americans gathered hickory nuts in quantity, crushed and boiled them. After straining out the solids they kept the oiliest portion of the liquid, a kind of “hickory milk” used in cooking. Pioneering Europeans also collected the nuts, congregating for “nut cracks,” a pastime commonly left to children.
Hammer in hand, I held my own singular “nut crack.” The husks came off easily as they are divided in quarters, but the shells required a gentle pounding and sprayed hickory shrapnel around the kitchen. The meats are tiny and lodged in maze of pockets that are hard to remove even with a steel nutpick. It’s a tedious process. I felt like a miner breaking up tons of overburden for a few flecks of gold. A renewed appreciation for what it takes to produce food dawned on me. We’ve been spoiled rotten by the ease of grocery stores.
I wound up with a little over three-quarters of a cup of meats, about 75% pignut, the remainder shagbark. In order to make a decent number of cookies, I needed a full cup so I added 20% commercial walnuts to a batter that included brown sugar, shortening, an egg and flour. Baking filled the house with an enticing aroma, and my family pronounced the finished confection delicious. Unfortunately, the cookies had to be eaten carefully since some contained a shard or two of shell. Next year I’ll collect earlier to obtain more nuts, and more assiduously remove even the fine pieces of hull.
Hard to get any other way than by foraging, the taste of hickory nuts includes the slight flavor of hunter-gathers, of living off the land, of a subsistence relationship with nature. Of course, for most of us in this age of world-wide food shipments it’s a bit of make-believe, but like many fairytales there are lessons to be gathered as easily as hickory nuts falling like manna.
