A Fall Field Guide Nuts

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A handbook for those who, to paraphrase the late Euell Gibbons, love to reap what they have not sown.

FOR CENTURIES WE HUMANS HAVE joined the squirrels and the raccoons, the turkeys and the boars, the deer and the chipmunks in the harvest of fall nuts. Nutting was once serious business, a matter of survival, of storing sustenance for the coming winter. So it was with Native Americans and colonists, and with European peasants-and so it remains today among people still living a hand-to-mouth existence with the earth. Few foods offer nutrition as completely and as compactly as the nut. Botanically, it is a seed, the embryonic life of a tree. But in effect, it is a hermetically sealed energy capsule, packed with protein and fat; a nourishment concentrate.

Most people today go nutting for pleasure. The nuts remain the quarry, but nuts aplenty (though perhaps of less noble bearing) can be had in any grocery store. Nutting, on the other hand, puts you inside the fall forest kaleidoscope, every step acrunch in leaves, the air crisp and laden with the musky scent of autumn. There is no better time to be in the woods, and no better excuse (whether or not you need one) than to be gathering tasty nuts.

Ah, there's the crux of the matter: Not all nuts are tasty. Some are astonishingly bitter. Others, though toothsome, require extreme determination, if not demolition, if one is to crack them apart-and then they may yield little more than a smidgen of edible kernel. Most folks know a nut when they see one, but what kind of nut is it, and is it worth picking up?

Acorns

No matter how many mothers have told their children otherwise, acorns are not poisonous; they are one of the oldest foods known to man. Evidence of their consumption has been found amid the debris in Paleolithic cave dwellings. They were the staff of life for many Native American groups, who ground the nuts into meal for bread and mush. The Pilgrims found baskets of roasted acorns hidden in underground chambers and, noting the nuts' similarity in taste to that of chestnuts, welcomed oak mast into their diet. A wise move: Acorn kernels provide a complete vegetable protein, up to 707o by weight in some species. More than half their bulk consists of energy-rich carbohydrates.

Amazingly, the annual nut crop from oak trees in North America surpasses the combined yearly yield of all other nut trees, both wild and cultivated. (So if you're wondering whether gathering up a bushel or two of acorns will deprive some creature of sustenance, worry not.) There are more than 60 species of oak trees in North America, and every one of them produces edible acorns.

Some, however, are more edible than others. Oaks are broadly divided into two groups: red (or black) oaks, and white. Generally, nuts from trees in the red-oak group have a bitter taste, thanks to their high content of tannin, an astringent substance. White oaks, however, contain less tannin and produce acorns that are considerably sweeter.