A Fall Field Guide Nuts

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In autumn, the beech's toothed, spear-shaped leaves turn a rich copper color or a near-luminous pale yellow and begin to fall, revealing reddish twigs and small, prickly burs. As they mature, the burs split open, exposing two (sometimes three) small, triangular nuts that ripen-usually by first frost-and drop to the ground. Competition for beechnuts is fierce among four-legged creatures, and the kernels can be hard to see once they're scattered among leaves, so your best bet is to try to gather them from lower branches just before they're ready to fall. If you're lucky, you'll get a few before the squirrels and raccoons do.

Beechnuts have a thin shell that you can peel off with a fingernail. The flesh is sweet and nutritious: nearly 20°70 protein! Fresh nuts spoil quickly, though, so dry them in full sun for a day or two (you or the family dog will have to stand guard over them), or roast them in a slow oven.

Though still abundant, American beeches once covered vast stretches of the Midwest from Kentucky to central Michigan. Unfortunately, settlers recognized the beech as a sign of good soil, and countless trees fell to the ax and plow. Eventually, their demise also contributed to the extinction of the passenger pigeon, which relied on beech mast for much of its diet.

Though the American beech is strictly an eastern tree, its similar-looking Old World cousin, the European beech ( F. sylvatica ) also produces edible nuts and has become naturalized both in the Northeast and in western coastal states.

Chestnuts and Chinquapins

Your chances of coming across a nut-bearing American chestnut (Castanea d entata) are almost nil, but no article on edible wild nuts is complete without mention of this once-great tree. Less than 100 years ago, stands of majestic chestnuts, some specimens measuring in excess of 120 feet tall and six feet around, covered a range of more than 200 million acres east of the Mississippi, from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Gathering bushels of sweet, fresh chestnuts—which were reportedly far superior in taste to the Italian and Chinese chestnuts we eat now—was a traditional autumn activity. Today, except for a few isolated specimens, all the great trees are gone, the victims of chestnut blight, a fungus carried to this country at the turn of the century on planting stock imported from the Orient.

As the disease spread from New York westward, infected trees were cut down in a futile attempt to halt the blight. The stumps remain, demonstrating the chestnut's superior rot-resistance, and many continue to send up sprouts, some of which survive a dozen or more years. On occasion, one of these seedlings produces a small nut crop for one or two seasons before succumbing to the blight. Sadly, then, most living chestnut trees are identifiable by their sapling size and by the old, weathered stumps from which they grow. Their leaves resemble a beech's, but are longer and more deeply toothed.

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