Spicebush

I ate an acorn today and it tasted terrible. I had already worked my way through the shell and pulled out a bit of the meaty inside. As I bit in I could feel the astringency filling my mouth, and immediately I realized - I know what this tastes like! Of course this prompted spitting and cursing on the ground. I have been reading Stalking the Wild Asparagus, a foraging book by survivalist Euell Gibbons from 1962 to get back to my roots as a kid digging in the dirt and eating rotten acorns. So far so good.

We’re in Connecticut for the weekend, so I took the opportunity to head out into the wild of my parent’s backyard and stalk me some acorns. It turns out that humans have been eating acorns forever. There are two types - those with pointy leaves, and those with rounder lobes. The pointer of the two have a more squarish acorn with a lot of tannin in it, which is where the astringency comes from. Tannin is water-soluble, so to make these palatable they just need to be boiled first. The rounder lobed oaks like the white and chestnut have sweeter acorns, and are supposed to be good even eaten raw, per chance I can find them tomorrow! Euell has a few great recipes for acorn meal, grits, and candied acorns which I must try.

What my mother did point out to me were just as rewarding and just as common: sassafras and spice bush. Sassafras, once acclaimed for its medicinal properties, has fallen by the wayside, so much so that someone like my mother would find herself pulling out the baby trees by the fistful. We did find some babies left, and wow were they fragrant. Just like the root beer that has made their taste famous. Spice bush also has a very heady fragrance that’s very lemony and a little spicy. Both plants leaves, bark, or twigs can be extracted and used fresh to flavor teas.

While I sniffed the torn sassafras twig and thought of all the A&W I’d slurped as a kid, Euell countered me with: “Some people object to the medicinal taste of sassafras tea, but those folks have things backward. Some medicines are flavored with sassafras, but this merely means that some medicines taste of sassafras, and not that sassafras tastes of medicine.” Funny how our brains are convinced that our first memories of a smell or taste must be where the scent or food originated. It’s just another way nature shows you that nothing beats the real source. If all goes well tomorrow I will stock up on nuts for the winter and make myself some tea!