A Fall Field Guide Nuts

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The chinquapins are close cousins of the American chestnut, and though they are also susceptible to blight, they are a bit more resistant and bear much earlier, at only two or three years old. The Ozark chinquapin (C. ozarkensis) is a small tree with long, deeply toothed leaves; it grows in a limited range encompassing western Arkansas, eastern Oklahoma and southern Missouri. The Allegheny chinquapin (C. pumila), really more a tall, thicket like shrub than a tree, sports similarly shaped but less deeply toothed leaves than its cousins. Its range extends from southern Pennsylvania through most of the Southeast to Texas. Both kinds of chinquapins yield sweet, small chestnut-like nuts (they look like flattened acorns), with each kernel encased in a hard shell within a prickly, round bur. Both the bur and the shell are difficult to remove, but they yield-in miniature-the taste of a bygone era. Chinquapins can be eaten raw, roasted or boiled.

Black Walnuts

Prized even more for its rich, dark wood than for its tasty nuts, America's black walnut (Fuglans nigra) is one of the great unknown victims of the two world wars. Just before and during both conflicts, black walnuts were felled en masse to meet the demand for gunstocks. Still, the tree survives throughout its original range: nearly all the eastern half of the U.S. except the far north. In the West, there are four other native walnut species with extremely limited ranges. Of them, only the northern California walnut (F. hindsii) produces nuts approaching the size and quality of its eastern cousin's.

The black walnut is easy to identify, particularly in the fall when, beginning early in the season, its leaves turn yellow and drop off, revealing clusters of one-and-one-half-to two-inch-diameter green globes-the nuts, enclosed in smooth, fleshy husks. In a few weeks the green fruit falls, too, and slowly turns black as the husk decomposes.

There are three formidable challenges to be met in harvesting black walnuts. First, you must get to the nuts before the squirrels; this is a matter of picking them up as soon after they fall as possible (sometimes a minute or two is none too early). Second, you must remove the nut from the husk before the flesh decomposes and saturates the inner shell and kernel with bitter brown juice. (That juice, incidentally, is an indelible dye that simply does not wash off clothing or skin.) And third, you'll have to extract the nutmeat from the shell.

All manner of methods have been devised for dehusking walnuts. Euell Gibbons suggested wearing heavy boots and simply toeing the husks off against the ground. Too often, though, much of the husk remains anyway. Others dump the nuts in their driveways and let a couple of days of traffic squash the husks off. This makes for a messy driveway, however, and the nuts tend to shoot out in all directions from under rubber tires. It's best to face facts, don old clothes, slip on a pair of rubber gloves and cut and scrape the husks away with a knife. Put the freshly hulled nuts on an old window screen, give them a good hard hosing to wash away bits of husk, and let them dry in the thin October sun.

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