ISSUE 59, CURIOSITIES, Part 2: Acorn Butter
Acorn Butter
The fashion for nut butters emerged in the 1890s, fueled by a tuberculosis outbreak in the United States that credulous people claimed came from milk. A myth circulated that butter = disease. Members of the physical culture movement—John Kellogg of Battle Creek MI in particular--drove the production of nut butters.—and the formulation of nut cookery can be said to have been accomplished by Almeda Lambert in 1899’s Guide to Nut Cookery. When one looks through Lambert’s landmark volume, you find a breadth to her conception of “nut”—discussing chufas, peanuts, Indian groundnuts, litchis, souari nuts, pinenuts and water chestnuts besides all of the standard nut varieties. Give the breadth of Lambert’s understanding of nuts and given her reliance on some Native nuts and their employments, the absence of any discussion of acorns in the volume seems odd. Perhaps her own experience of the tannins in acorns dissuaded her from reckoning them a useful food source.
Native peoples knew that certain oak varieties—the Swamp White Oak (Quercus bicolor) for instance—bore “mild” (low tannin) nuts requiring substantially less water processing to make them palatable. The Chestnut Oak (Quercus michauxii) with its chestnut shaped leaves was another “sweet” variety. On the West Coast the Coastal Live Oak with its streamlined acorns are low tannin. In contrast, the introduced English oak (Quercus robur) produced the most acrid nuts on the landscape. A number of modern breeders have worked to create “edible oaks” often working with the Bur Oak of the East as base stock [acorns depicted above]. The Northern Nutgrowers Association has an Edible Oaks Committee. Most of their work deals with the Swamp White Oak or Bur Oak varieties. One can easily secure the Ashworth, Krieder, and Sweet Idaho strains of the latter from nut brokers.
Some Native American Peoples preferred the more astringent red oak acorns for culinary uses because of their higher fat content and better storing qualities. They trusted on their abilities to leech out the astringency of the nuts. Because most acorns are high and starch and low in oil and protein, explaining the Native interest in higher fat varieties.
I sampled acorn butter on the West Coast at a farmer’s market made from the Coastal Live Oak. The nut meats were taken from the shells, boiled at a low simmer for 5 hours, changing out the water every hour. Then the nuts were roasted to enhance flavor, ground and mashed with canola oil and salt to create the butter. The purveyor said that she would have liked to have used almond oil rather than canola to make the butter, but the cost was prohibitive.
The blog practicalselfreliance.com has a detailed set of instructions on how to make acorn butter.