Oaks, Our Food Trees
by Josephine Laing
Five hundred years ago, this area of California was one of the wealthiest in the world. Of course, there wasn't a monetary system, like we know today, but the land itself provided the wealth. And that wealth blossomed forth from the bosom of our oak trees. And it still does. These magnificent, beneficent beings live for three hundred or more years and offer a bounty of acorns from among their numbers every year. We also have the bounty of the ocean and back then the meadows and woods were teaming with wild game and birds of many colors. Times have changed and our natural flora and wildlife populations have diminished significantly. But our majestic old oaks still litter the ground each year with their rich fruit.
Acorns are packed full of nutrition and provide 4% protein, between 4 and 20% fat (depending on the species) and a whopping 56% carbohydrate. All of which are needed for healthy bodily metabolism. In a good year, one tree will yield several hundred pounds of acorns. And, oak trees grow on almost every major continent of the world.
Acorns were a staple in the diet of the local Chumash and many other of the first nation peoples. When California's original inhabitants would prepare acorns, they would first grind them into little bits with some of it as fine as flour. Locally you can still come across their mortars on top of large granite boulders. The women would grind enough acorn from their stored reserves to feed their families every morning. Then they'd leach them to remove the tannins. The people of the Sierra foothills, where sandy soils are common, would form a shallow basin near the shore of a creek or river and line it with leaves. They'd put their ground acorn in the basin and then gently pour in water over their fingers. Once the basin was full, the water would slowly percolate through the leaves, down into the soil, carrying the water soluble tannins from the acorn meal with it. The Chumash used a shallow basket suspended above the ground with a reed framework for the same purpose. Other tribes buried the whole hulled acorns for several days in the soil beneath the water, right in the creek. All of these methods of leaching would remove the mildly toxic bitter flavor from the food.
The Chumash would then place the wet acorn meal in finely woven sturdy water tight baskets. They'd add a little more water and then drop in nice smooth rocks, each with a hole at one end, which had been thoroughly heated in the morning fire. The hole allowed the rocks to be easily transported using a wooden stick with a hook formed at one end. The hot rocks would instantly bring the wet meal to a boil and the women stirred the contents with wooden paddles to avoid burning their fine baskets. Within moments, Viola!, there was the morning's porridge, soft enough for even the toothless old folks and the babies to chew. The people would eat their acorn with whatever else that they had on hand, be it roasted ground squirrels or fish. Everyone would start their day, most everyday, with this nutritious meal, and then off they'd go about their business.
The Dos Pueblos area of Santa Barbara had two very large villages. It is believed that there were a thousand people there, living on both sides of the creek. It was one of the largest settlements in California. And how could so many people living so densely support themselves on the land within their immediate walking distance? You guessed it, acorns from oak trees, the staple of their diet. Of course they also ate other plant foods, fish and abalone. They gathered seeds from the fields into their baskets, which were designed to allow them to harvest as they walked along. They ate the Islay cherry (Prunus ilicifolia) which also had to be processed before eating to remove it's toxins. And wild game was abundant. But their mainstay, which fed them every day, was the acorn. It being easy to gather, store and prepare.
Learning about all of this fascinated Frank and I and we decided to try and make acorn flour "the white man's way." So, we laboriously hand peeled them with sharp paring knives, or split each one with a pliers and wrestled them from their hulls. We ground them in electric coffee grinders and dunked them in boiling water bathes to leach them. All of which took a tremendous amount of time and yielded varying results.
Then one day I just got fed up and went out back to the concrete patio, swept off an area and hit one with a clean, hand-sized rock. Presto! The hull popped off and the acorn was reduced to small chunks. A few more handfuls of acorn, each getting a good whack and I soon had enough for a nice meal. We scooped that up into a bowl and Frank finished it off into fine flour in the coffee grinder. We then found out that hot water locks the tannin into the acorn meal. So, cold water does the better job for leaching acorn.
Hoping to imitate the creek-side leaf-basin, I took a tea towel and placed it in a colander and then filled it with my acorn flour. I then partially submerged the colander, tea towel, flour and all in a large bowl of water. After an hour or so, I lifted up the colander, letting the newly brown tannin filled water drain from the flour through the cloth and refilled the bowl underneath with fresh water. I repeated that process a couple of times till the meal lost that black-tea-like tannin after taste. Then it was time to make biscuits, a-corn bread or pancakes, replacing the wheat or corn flour in the recipes with the same quantity of acorn and reducing the liquid in the recipe a little bit since the flour was already wet.
Many of the first nation peoples stored their acorn in baskets in their homes or in caches up in trees lined with cedar leaves. These helped to keep the insects at bay and the hungry animals away. But first, they would spread the acorn harvest out on mats on the ground in the sun for a couple of weeks to dry the meat before storing them so they wouldn't rot or mold. Most would also hull the acorns before storing them. The people would do this by delivering a well aimed blow to the base of an acorn which was balanced point end down, using a small hole in a rock. They would then dry the hulled acorns a week or so longer. Then they'd rub them in shallow baskets to remove the papery brown seed coat from the fruit. This allowed them to store only perfect acorns which were ready to quickly grind up fresh into flour every morning.
Frank and I use the guest bed under a sunny west facing window to dry our acorn. That way the critters won't bother them. We used to use the back of our little black truck, it was so nice and hot. But then the raccoons caught on to it and had several all night parties in there, so we switched to indoors. And Frank and I don't need several hundred pounds of acorn in the house, thirty or forty will usually do. So, we just store ours in the hull. A friend of ours gathers her acorn in low boxes and baskets and then leaves them in her car for a few weeks to dry. I hear she makes a wonderful acorn enchilada.
Being as the Chumash had a diet rich in carbohydrates and animal proteins with comparatively fewer high soluble fiber vegetable and fruit foods, they needed to take steps to avoid constipation. Because of this, they preferred the coast live oak (Quercus agrifolia) for it's high fat content. And if needed, they used the bark from the coffee berry bush (Rhamnus californica,) as a tea, to regulate their systems.
But our modern diet is rich in fruits and vegetables, so, though it has a relatively low fat content, Frank and I treasure the blue oak (Quercus douglasii) for it's sweet meat and mild level of tannins. Sometimes we only have to leach it once before cooking with it.
We're so lucky to have the blue oaks here. Like many oak species, they are endemic to our area. Blue oaks grow only in California and don't appear anywhere else in the world. All of the oaks in Heilman Park, adjacent to Chalk Mountain golf course, are blue oaks. And the grove runs in a line from Atascadero to the coastal mountain range. Their leaves have a light blueish cast to them and look like a cross between the loose lobed softer valley oak leaves (Quercus lobata) and the shiny, more leathery, cupped and spiny coast live oak leaves. So they are lightly lobed, mildly cupped with an occasional spine and that blueish gray tint. But all oak acorns are edible and nutritious, so it really doesn't matter.
And we all need to plant oak trees too. Every year, from my stored reserves, I walk out into the wild places, and send my hiking friends out too, with a pocketfuls of acorn to plant.
In the past thirty years, living here in the city, I've noticed the bird populations shift and change. At first we still had Orioles nesting in the yard. Then a decade later, we had robins and stellar’s jays. Then we got western scrub-jays and mockingbirds. Now we only have the crows. And we love the crows. But, it's the jays who have always planted the oak trees. They cache away their larder in the ground, often forgetting where they've buried it. While the jays lived here, we had oaks popping up everywhere in the yard. It's been five or ten years since they've moved on and so our baby oaks have come no more.
Then in the fields and hillsides, the cows browse on the baby trees. So now, we mostly only have older oaks growing on our hills and in our valleys. Thus, it's a good idea to plant them. Take a walk, with a good stout stick, after a gentle rain. Poke a hole about two or three inches deep in some nice soft soil where you could imagine a tree, preferably on the far side of the fence from the cows, and drop in an acorn. Then go on, one pocketful at a time, to plant yourself a hundred trees.
And if you happen to be lucky enough to live near an oak. Remember that lawns and gardens, as lovely as you may think they'll be under the shade of a tree, will kill an oak in just seven or eight short years, bringing it's centuries long life to an abrupt end. Because, oak trees can tolerate No-Summer-Water beneath their boughs. Moist soil with summer heat invites soil funguses which thrive and choke the roots causing these majestic giants to buckle and fall, long before their time, reducing their once life sustaining branches to a quickly vaporized fuel for someone's backyard bar-b-cue.
Plant beneath the boughs if you must, but only so long as you can leave that garden to dry all summer long. Better yet, leave it bare beneath, the easier to rake those excellent leaves to make your compost or spread sheets onto which you can reach up to shake or knock the branches with a pole and let the rain of plenty fall in the form of acorns for you to dry and store and enjoy.
Frank and I store our acorn in canvas grocery shopping bags. We line them with cedar leaves and hang the strong bags full of acorn on sturdy wooden coat hangers in the spare closet along with our other stored foods and emergency supplies.
It's a joy to gently bump the plump swaying bags of acorn as we reach in among the shelves for our dried beans and apricots sitting side by side in neat quart glass jars. And an even greater joy to reach in for a couple of handfuls of the smooth round and pointy acorns in their sleek, shiny hulls, taking them out for a good whack on the patio, knowing that pancakes will soon be in the pan.
So long as we all have oak trees nearby, we have no need for food fears, because we will always have plenty. Abundance is nature's way. And our oak trees are treasure groves of food wealth and health.
© 2011 Josephine Laing
Five hundred years ago, this area of California was one of the wealthiest in the world. Of course, there wasn't a monetary system, like we know today, but the land itself provided the wealth. And that wealth blossomed forth from the bosom of our oak trees. And it still does. These magnificent, beneficent beings live for three hundred or more years and offer a bounty of acorns from among their numbers every year. We also have the bounty of the ocean and back then the meadows and woods were teaming with wild game and birds of many colors. Times have changed and our natural flora and wildlife populations have diminished significantly. But our majestic old oaks still litter the ground each year with their rich fruit.
Acorns are packed full of nutrition and provide 4% protein, between 4 and 20% fat (depending on the species) and a whopping 56% carbohydrate. All of which are needed for healthy bodily metabolism. In a good year, one tree will yield several hundred pounds of acorns. And, oak trees grow on almost every major continent of the world.
Acorns were a staple in the diet of the local Chumash and many other of the first nation peoples. When California's original inhabitants would prepare acorns, they would first grind them into little bits with some of it as fine as flour. Locally you can still come across their mortars on top of large granite boulders. The women would grind enough acorn from their stored reserves to feed their families every morning. Then they'd leach them to remove the tannins. The people of the Sierra foothills, where sandy soils are common, would form a shallow basin near the shore of a creek or river and line it with leaves. They'd put their ground acorn in the basin and then gently pour in water over their fingers. Once the basin was full, the water would slowly percolate through the leaves, down into the soil, carrying the water soluble tannins from the acorn meal with it. The Chumash used a shallow basket suspended above the ground with a reed framework for the same purpose. Other tribes buried the whole hulled acorns for several days in the soil beneath the water, right in the creek. All of these methods of leaching would remove the mildly toxic bitter flavor from the food.
The Chumash would then place the wet acorn meal in finely woven sturdy water tight baskets. They'd add a little more water and then drop in nice smooth rocks, each with a hole at one end, which had been thoroughly heated in the morning fire. The hole allowed the rocks to be easily transported using a wooden stick with a hook formed at one end. The hot rocks would instantly bring the wet meal to a boil and the women stirred the contents with wooden paddles to avoid burning their fine baskets. Within moments, Viola!, there was the morning's porridge, soft enough for even the toothless old folks and the babies to chew. The people would eat their acorn with whatever else that they had on hand, be it roasted ground squirrels or fish. Everyone would start their day, most everyday, with this nutritious meal, and then off they'd go about their business.
The Dos Pueblos area of Santa Barbara had two very large villages. It is believed that there were a thousand people there, living on both sides of the creek. It was one of the largest settlements in California. And how could so many people living so densely support themselves on the land within their immediate walking distance? You guessed it, acorns from oak trees, the staple of their diet. Of course they also ate other plant foods, fish and abalone. They gathered seeds from the fields into their baskets, which were designed to allow them to harvest as they walked along. They ate the Islay cherry (Prunus ilicifolia) which also had to be processed before eating to remove it's toxins. And wild game was abundant. But their mainstay, which fed them every day, was the acorn. It being easy to gather, store and prepare.
Learning about all of this fascinated Frank and I and we decided to try and make acorn flour "the white man's way." So, we laboriously hand peeled them with sharp paring knives, or split each one with a pliers and wrestled them from their hulls. We ground them in electric coffee grinders and dunked them in boiling water bathes to leach them. All of which took a tremendous amount of time and yielded varying results.
Then one day I just got fed up and went out back to the concrete patio, swept off an area and hit one with a clean, hand-sized rock. Presto! The hull popped off and the acorn was reduced to small chunks. A few more handfuls of acorn, each getting a good whack and I soon had enough for a nice meal. We scooped that up into a bowl and Frank finished it off into fine flour in the coffee grinder. We then found out that hot water locks the tannin into the acorn meal. So, cold water does the better job for leaching acorn.
Hoping to imitate the creek-side leaf-basin, I took a tea towel and placed it in a colander and then filled it with my acorn flour. I then partially submerged the colander, tea towel, flour and all in a large bowl of water. After an hour or so, I lifted up the colander, letting the newly brown tannin filled water drain from the flour through the cloth and refilled the bowl underneath with fresh water. I repeated that process a couple of times till the meal lost that black-tea-like tannin after taste. Then it was time to make biscuits, a-corn bread or pancakes, replacing the wheat or corn flour in the recipes with the same quantity of acorn and reducing the liquid in the recipe a little bit since the flour was already wet.
Many of the first nation peoples stored their acorn in baskets in their homes or in caches up in trees lined with cedar leaves. These helped to keep the insects at bay and the hungry animals away. But first, they would spread the acorn harvest out on mats on the ground in the sun for a couple of weeks to dry the meat before storing them so they wouldn't rot or mold. Most would also hull the acorns before storing them. The people would do this by delivering a well aimed blow to the base of an acorn which was balanced point end down, using a small hole in a rock. They would then dry the hulled acorns a week or so longer. Then they'd rub them in shallow baskets to remove the papery brown seed coat from the fruit. This allowed them to store only perfect acorns which were ready to quickly grind up fresh into flour every morning.
Frank and I use the guest bed under a sunny west facing window to dry our acorn. That way the critters won't bother them. We used to use the back of our little black truck, it was so nice and hot. But then the raccoons caught on to it and had several all night parties in there, so we switched to indoors. And Frank and I don't need several hundred pounds of acorn in the house, thirty or forty will usually do. So, we just store ours in the hull. A friend of ours gathers her acorn in low boxes and baskets and then leaves them in her car for a few weeks to dry. I hear she makes a wonderful acorn enchilada.
Being as the Chumash had a diet rich in carbohydrates and animal proteins with comparatively fewer high soluble fiber vegetable and fruit foods, they needed to take steps to avoid constipation. Because of this, they preferred the coast live oak (Quercus agrifolia) for it's high fat content. And if needed, they used the bark from the coffee berry bush (Rhamnus californica,) as a tea, to regulate their systems.
But our modern diet is rich in fruits and vegetables, so, though it has a relatively low fat content, Frank and I treasure the blue oak (Quercus douglasii) for it's sweet meat and mild level of tannins. Sometimes we only have to leach it once before cooking with it.
We're so lucky to have the blue oaks here. Like many oak species, they are endemic to our area. Blue oaks grow only in California and don't appear anywhere else in the world. All of the oaks in Heilman Park, adjacent to Chalk Mountain golf course, are blue oaks. And the grove runs in a line from Atascadero to the coastal mountain range. Their leaves have a light blueish cast to them and look like a cross between the loose lobed softer valley oak leaves (Quercus lobata) and the shiny, more leathery, cupped and spiny coast live oak leaves. So they are lightly lobed, mildly cupped with an occasional spine and that blueish gray tint. But all oak acorns are edible and nutritious, so it really doesn't matter.
And we all need to plant oak trees too. Every year, from my stored reserves, I walk out into the wild places, and send my hiking friends out too, with a pocketfuls of acorn to plant.
In the past thirty years, living here in the city, I've noticed the bird populations shift and change. At first we still had Orioles nesting in the yard. Then a decade later, we had robins and stellar’s jays. Then we got western scrub-jays and mockingbirds. Now we only have the crows. And we love the crows. But, it's the jays who have always planted the oak trees. They cache away their larder in the ground, often forgetting where they've buried it. While the jays lived here, we had oaks popping up everywhere in the yard. It's been five or ten years since they've moved on and so our baby oaks have come no more.
Then in the fields and hillsides, the cows browse on the baby trees. So now, we mostly only have older oaks growing on our hills and in our valleys. Thus, it's a good idea to plant them. Take a walk, with a good stout stick, after a gentle rain. Poke a hole about two or three inches deep in some nice soft soil where you could imagine a tree, preferably on the far side of the fence from the cows, and drop in an acorn. Then go on, one pocketful at a time, to plant yourself a hundred trees.
And if you happen to be lucky enough to live near an oak. Remember that lawns and gardens, as lovely as you may think they'll be under the shade of a tree, will kill an oak in just seven or eight short years, bringing it's centuries long life to an abrupt end. Because, oak trees can tolerate No-Summer-Water beneath their boughs. Moist soil with summer heat invites soil funguses which thrive and choke the roots causing these majestic giants to buckle and fall, long before their time, reducing their once life sustaining branches to a quickly vaporized fuel for someone's backyard bar-b-cue.
Plant beneath the boughs if you must, but only so long as you can leave that garden to dry all summer long. Better yet, leave it bare beneath, the easier to rake those excellent leaves to make your compost or spread sheets onto which you can reach up to shake or knock the branches with a pole and let the rain of plenty fall in the form of acorns for you to dry and store and enjoy.
Frank and I store our acorn in canvas grocery shopping bags. We line them with cedar leaves and hang the strong bags full of acorn on sturdy wooden coat hangers in the spare closet along with our other stored foods and emergency supplies.
It's a joy to gently bump the plump swaying bags of acorn as we reach in among the shelves for our dried beans and apricots sitting side by side in neat quart glass jars. And an even greater joy to reach in for a couple of handfuls of the smooth round and pointy acorns in their sleek, shiny hulls, taking them out for a good whack on the patio, knowing that pancakes will soon be in the pan.
So long as we all have oak trees nearby, we have no need for food fears, because we will always have plenty. Abundance is nature's way. And our oak trees are treasure groves of food wealth and health.
© 2011 Josephine Laing