the shagbark
The hardwood forest of Appalachia extends westward across the Mississippi in the deep woods of the Ozarks in southern Missouri and northern Arkansas where I lived long ago in what seems to me now almost another life in another world. It was a world of trees. The deep woods displayed a large variety of species. Most prominent were various inferior oaks, and especially gnarly and knotty pin oaks, good for little more than firewood; but there were in those days still to be found here or there a few magnificent remnants of the old growth. There was still a good deal of ash, and other trees of beautiful shape. When it came to real hard wood, however, I always thought of the hickories. This was before the era of the chain saw, and doing battle with a hickory from one end of a cross-cut was an Olympic event. My uncle’s barn was mainly used as a hayloft, but one aisle of it was given over to the kind of heavy metal bric-a-brac that goes unsold at farm auctions, and to several piles of “special” lumber being saved indefinitely for “special” projects that somehow never came to fruition. The collection included a stack of tall, thick hickory posts that had been curing since before the year of my birth and had the weight of stone and the feel of steel.
It is the hardness of hickory wood that makes it so good for baseball bats and tool handles. In olden days it was used ox yokes and barrel staves. Andrew Jackson came by the moniker “Old Hickory” for personality traits not all of us would admire. Its use in infantile chastisement is remembered in several relics of our popular culture, such as—
School days, school days
Dear old golden rule days.
Readin’ and ‘ritin’ and ‘rithmetic,
Taught to the tune of the hickory stick…
though in my parts usually called a hickory switch.
There are many varieties of hickory (family carya), all of which so far as I know produce edible nuts. The whole family of carya are first cousins to the Juglandaceae (walnuts). The hickory nut with which you are probably most familiar is the pecan. It is native to the American South, where it has been developed as a cultivated crop. However the seed produced by the shagbark hickory (the carya ovata) has a deliciousness all of its own.* That is the good news. The bad news is that it is a herculean task to get the meat out of the shells. The Ozark natives of my youth—folks who would eat with relish nearly anything edible that could be shot, trapped, hooked, plucked, picked, gathered, or simply found dragged in by the cat—mainly regarded the hickory nut as more work than it was worth. But of course they were not retired professors with time on their hands.
outer shells
There are many varieties of hickories, and some variants among the shagbarks themselves, that are pretty common in the backwoods in many parts of America, including suburban Mercer County, NJ. About four years ago I wrote an essay about harvesting local black walnuts. But somehow the hickory nut did not re-impress itself on my consciousness until fall arrived this year when, on one of my walks around lake and canal towpath I was quite literally struck by one of them in its descent. Sir Isaac Newton is supposed to have been seized with a Great Idea on a similar occasion. I was seized by a small one. Why should I not start gathering a few hickory nuts on my frequent constitutionals?
The real woods around here must be opulent in nut trees. Unfortunately, I am rather unsteady on my feet these days. I don’t mind going into real woods if someone else is with me. My son Richard and I have pursued chanterelles together over some very iffy terrain. But a serious fall far from the beaten path might prove injurious to my remaining health, so that on long solo walks I need to follow a more or less established footpath with a more or less even and visible track. Even with this drastic restriction though, I am finding a bountiful nut harvest, some of it even along paved roads. So I trudge along, cane in one hand and nut bag in the other. It appears that the effect this sight has on anyone who chances to see me is roughly that inspired by the samphire gatherer in King Lear. (“Dreadful trade,” says Edgar.)
The nuts of the varying species vary in size and construction, and I will take any that look promising or even possible; but the best and most numerous are the shagbarks. The shagbark, like its black walnut cousin, has a double shell. You can see the construction in some photographs taken this week. The outer shell, which offers a kind of preliminary protection, is roughly spherical and about an inch and a half to two inches in diameter. Its thickness, though variable, is roughly that of a walnut and has a similar sturdiness, something like thick cork. The color on the tree is a garish green, but this fairly soon turns brown or blackish as it lies on the ground. The ball is seamed in quadrants that, like postage stamps in a perforated sheet, are fairly begging to be dismantled. Many nuts, especially those falling on hard earth from a considerable height, crack apart when they hit the ground. One commonly finds the pristine nuts scattered loose beneath their tree. Even those with outer shells that do not self-destruct present no serious resistance to rodent teeth. But then the real fun begins. The small, lightish-brown inner shell, which guards the meat, is the original tough nut to crack. What else could you expect from the toughest wood in the forest?
The inner shell has roughly the contours of a walnut, only about half the size or smaller, meaning that the meat of the interior is even more tightly constrained and difficult to break free of its amazingly strong latticed carapace. The shell is nearly invincible. It will explode beneath a hammer blow, but only one so forceful as to smash the edible part of the nut to smithereens in the process. Stout pliers, of which the only nutcracker I have is a feeble derivative, do nothing. Fortunately, I do have one tool that does work: an old cast iron book press intended for use in bookbinding. “Who breaks a butterfly upon the wheel?” asks Pope; and the answer is that I do.
Free food! I admit that were you to cost out my labor at minimum wage, hickory meat would probably cost out at roughly seventy-five dollars an ounce. I can’t be sure because I haven’t gotten my first ounce yet. I keep eating it as I go. But as I have tried to remind my spouse, who thinks I am nuts to engage in the enterprise, what is important here is to remember that it is the journey, not the destination. I wonder if there is any good samphire gathering to be had in these parts. In fact, I wonder what samphire is.
*I am no botanist. For technical terms I rely on a book indispensable to anyone interested in Ozark flora: Julian A. Steyermark’s Flora of Missouri (Iowa State University Press, 1963.)
