First Pig Nut Sighting: East Hampton, September 17, 4:30 p.m. Walking today along Route 114, in East Hampton, I glanced down to see what I think are the very first pig nuts I have seen this year. Growing up in Holden on the 100-acre farm that was the Donway home, there was a big field beginning almost at our backyard. Today, that field is part of the Birchwood Acres development that my father built; but when I was a boy it was this big field, left un-mowed year after year, with no trees, really, except one: a giant nut tree way to the side, near the edge of the woods Well, we discovered it as kids, of course, and learned from my dad that these were pig nuts. If you broke off the thick spongy outer cover, which was in four segments, you got to the inner, almost white, hard shell of the nut. If you cracked this (with a rock, of course (who carried a nut cracker?), you got a mash-up of shell bits and some tidbits of sweet nutmeat. You could kill a lot of time, on a warm autumn afternoon, bent over a flat boulder, with a rock in hand, raised, like primitive man, trying to hit the nut squarely so it would crack and not fly off the rock 10 feet into the grass. Or into little brothers eye. In East Hampton, now, they rain down on my driveway--but not yet. In time, I will have perhaps 300 on my driveway and if I carefully cracked them and extracted the meat with a straightened paperclip, in about four hours I might have half a cup. I have wondered again and again over the years: Do they really call these pig nuts? And never looked it up. Till now. There are actually TWO types of Pig Nuts. The one we ate is the nut of the brown hickory, Cary glabra, of North America. The tree, also, is called a Pig Nut. But the other is the tuber of a European plant, Conopodium denudatum. The name goes WAY back to 1610. I have posted, here, a photo of a dried Pig Nut, its shell shrunken and almost black and partly peeled off. In fact, that is what you wanted. If the outer shell was green and wet, the inner nut was actually wet and, inside, the meat had not separated from the shell. Nor ripened. By the way, if you Google Photo, Pig Nut, you must add tree. Or you get, er, pig nuts, attached, removed, of various colors, even packed in plastic. You may not want to go there. I didnt stop to learn what they do with them. A very touchy topic for the male of a species. I posted briefly about pig nuts, on this page, I believe, and got more comments than on almost any other post, except perhaps about the Worcester tornado or the blizzard of 1978. The original post and all the comments are in my book, Youre Probably from Holden, If..., available on Amazon both as an e-book or a paperback. But more pig nut discussion then occurs in the companion Worcester book. I had not realized that people all around Worcester knew of pig nuts, and many loved them, recalling expeditions with a parent that harvested hundreds of nuts, eaten all winter long. So excited did so many people become that I jokingly proposed, once, that my book should be entitled, The Pig Nut Papers.
Posted on: Thu, 18 Sep 2014 00:32:45 +0000
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