[Granville-Hough] 18 Jan 2009 - Wild Foods

[Trustees and Executors for Granville W. Hough]

With regard to my story yesterday, Mr. Maier tried us out for
A Squad Choir. If we failed that you got a consolation of B Squad. If he
thought you had no voice at all, it was: "next cadet, please!"

Wild Food.

Before I discuss this subject which has always been of great interest to
me, I wish to make an explanatory note. Some people who know I spent 23
years in the Army as a West Point graduate automatically assume I doted
on military heroes in my youth. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
So far as I know, the first time I ever saw or talked to a West Point
graduate was 3 Jul 1943 when I walked into the Cadet Guardhouse at West
Point and reported to the Officer of the Day for duty. Only two weeks
earlier at the Anniston, AL, Public Library, had I learned anything
about cadet life. I had finished two years of ROTC, but all my
instructors were Reserve Officers.
My boyhood heroes were leaders of forestry and plant development in the
United States. My favorite presidents were George Washington and Thomas
Jefferson, because I learned about their farming practices. Meriwether
Lewis and William Clark were intriguing because they described so well
the plants and animals they encountered on the Lewis and Clark
Expedition. I liked John Muir and Luther Burbank because they improved
plants and crops they found or introduced to California. I noted at the
time that nearly all the heads of the Forestry Service had been
graduates of Yale. I was the second person to ever enroll in Forestry at
Mississippi State, but I never lost my interest in the other things in
the forest besides commercial timber. As Mississippi State only had two
years of Forestry, I was facing a choice of school to continue; and I
preferred Yale. That is the choice I did not get to make.
This discussion is about wild foods of Mississippi, and the
possibilities for developing them as Luther Burbank had done with plants
in California. The particular plants which interested me which grew all
around were persimmons, plums, hickory nuts, paw-paw, chinquapins, honey
locust, muscadines, wild grapes, maypops, huckleberries, blackberries,
dewberries, beargrass, pokeweed, acorns, mushrooms, and sheep showers. I
also looked at sassafras roots and sweetgum chickle as potential products.
We can dispose of several of these, as they were developed by others.
Blackberries, spring huckleberries (blueberries), muscadines, plums,
blackberries, and persimmons were readily available in improved
varieties. My brother Clifford and I moved beargrass up near the house
so we could use its leaves for hanging our pork in the smokehouse. We
did the same thing at Grandpa Richardson’s house. Sassafras was a
ditchbank tree of small size (of the laurel family) and long roots which
went down through the sandy soil to permanent moisture. We found we
could always find it on our ditchbanks and pull out the roots when we
wanted sassafras tea. We cut up the roots and boiled them to get a
reddish tea of strong sassafras flavor. We then sweetened it with rock
sugar from the bottom of a molasses can. This made a wonderfully
satisfying tea which probably had some medicinal qualities. We did not
see a market for the sassafras roots. We experimented with getting
sweetgum sap and trying to chew it into gum. Many people claimed it
could be done. We were never successful. I personally believed we could
collect the sap and cook it down into sweetgum sugar, just as maple
sugar is prepared in New England and Canada.
Another plant we did not get to explore much was the honey locust, a
leguminous tree which had a long seed pod, in which the beans were
separated by a sweet edible pulp. The trouble was that insects got into
this pulp before we had a chance to eat it. Nowadays the honey locust
bean and pulp are commercially made into a flavoring much like thin
chocolate. I get some when I go to Trader Joe’s.
We had only one paw-paw (North American papaya) bush in the upper
Meadow, but I never got to taste a ripe one. When I got to Panama on
military duty and smelled papaya in Sunday fruit salad, I knew instantly
what it was from its smell. The birds always got to the ripe paw-paws
first and left only that smell. I thought they must be good if the birds
attended the ripening fruit that closely. We also had only one
chinquapin tree (dwarf chesnut). The nuts were covered with a stickery
pin burr which discouraged opening prematurely. Chinquapins tasted just
like regular chesnuts, so we could see no future in a dwarf variety
where you had to work so hard to get the fruit.
We did try to improve maypops. The maypop is a climbing perennial
variety of passion-flower which sprouted from its roots each year or
from new seeds. We would find it as a pest, especially on our terrace
rows. We would have at least a dozen plants per acre. They had many
fruit, green balls about two inches in diameter. If you stepped on a
green ball, they popped indeed, and let out an unpleasant smell which
can only be described as the green maypop smell. In the fall, when the
maypop ripened, it turned yellow and soft and had a wonderful smell. I
never knew what ambrosia smelled like, but I thought ripe maypop must be
close. To eat one, you got it into your mouth, squeezed and swallowed
the juice and then swished it about in your mouth until you got all the
flavoring, then spat out the seed.
My idea was to plant them along the fence under the purple martin poles.
If other birds came by to eat the ripe fruit, the martins would drive
them away. This worked very well, but I kept finding my ripe maypops
eaten anyway. I wondered what was happening. Finally, I saw our domestic
chickens in action. I had forgotten they had the run of the area, in
fact the fence was their boundary. As they did not fly, the purple
martins paid no attention to them. The chickens thoroughly enjoyed the
maypops, but I made no improvements on the maypop plant that year. The
next spring we joined Grandpa Jim Richardson, and I did not work on
maypops again. Who knows? Had I continued my work on maypops, they might
be on Southern menus today.
We had pokeweed or pokeberries growing next to many of our cottonhouses,
which we used for all kinds of storage. It was a tall plant with reddish
branches, white flowers, and red berries with seeds. The red berries
were wonderful for temporary coloring of your face, hands, or clothes.
Our mother did not mind as the red dye was not fast and washed away in
contact with water. The roots were poisonous, but young shoots were
delicious when cooked as greens. I have heard people refer to the food
as poke salad, but I only had them cooked, not as a salad. Asparagus did
not do well in our soil and latitude, so I believed we would do better
to grow the pokeberry plant and harvest the young shoots, just as
asparagus is harvested.
Another most interesting plant was known to us as sheep showers. We
would find it alongside our road and in our pastures. It seemed to grow
in piles of cow or sheep manure. It was clean alongside our road so we
would grab a handful of sheep showers and gobble it up. It had a sour
taste which brought out lots of saliva. We ate it as one would eat
salad. It needed nothing to be added. Something like sheep showers is
also known as wood sorrel or as dock. I wish we had gotten it going in
our garden, but our mother was very skeptical of the plant based on her
understanding of its origin.
Another plant we ate by the handful was fall huckleberries. They ripened
in October but were less juicy than their cousins the spring
blueberries. We grabbed a handful, removed the larger stems, and then
got a mouthful and chomped away. After we got all the delicious juice,
we spat out the stems and seeds. I asked my brother Clifford if there
were any improvements made on fall huckleberries, but he thought not.
The blueberries were so commercially successful that the fall
huckleberries would have been considered inferior.
Another nut I wanted to improve was a hickory nut which grew in an old
Ware field on a sandy hillside west of the Meadow. They were as large as
English Walnuts and had a wonderful nutty taste. We must have had at
least ten other varieties of hickory nuts, all different sizes and
tastes; but none were as good as this one. In season, we would crack the
nuts, then dig out the goodies with big nails we had flattened for the
purpose.
We probably had edible acorns but did not know which they were or how to
prepare them. Since we did not burn our woods we also had on our damp
logs all kinds of mushrooms. We never touched them, as we know some were
poison. If you got lost, and knew the difference, you could have
survived on mushrooms. But it seemed that no one knew, and there was no
tradition for eating mushrooms. It was an idea as exotic as eating
snails, locusts, or grasshoppers.
In my last semester at Mississippi State, I was taking a course in plant
classification with Dr. McKee, then head of the Botany Department. Our
text was written by a New Englander, who had probably done very well
with the plants indigenous to New England; but he seemed quite slipshod
on Southern Mississippi varieties. When I was called to active duty at
Camp Shelby, MS, about 1 April 1943, one of the last things I did was to
collect five plants from the Hough farm I considered to be wrongly
classified and send them to Dr. McKee. 

WildFood, 29 Jul.

>From niece Carol Linger:

Uncle Granville,

      Russ and I just last night heard a gentlemen named Lee Stetson 
give an hour long monologue as John Muir.  He was excellent.  Evidently 
he lives near Yosemite and spends his summers as John Muir in the park. 
  He is an excellent actor who has spent most of his life doing this 
very thing.  You and/or David may have heard him at some time.  He was 
speaking at an event called Wilderness Wildlife Week which is a weeklong 
series of lectures, hikes and workshops held in Pigeon Forge, TN, at the 
foot of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  We try to attend this 
award winning event every year(it might be something David might have an 
interest in).  Some years we go to more lectures than others.  This year 
our participation was limited to both weekends.  Our week in between was 
full of other obligations and meetings this time.  It is amazing to see 
the number of people who attend this event from all over the U.S.  What 
is most amazing is that all the presenters all come and do this every 
year and there is no fee associated with the event for attenders.  It is 
a wonderful way to increase knowledge of the natural world around us. 
Russ and I so enjoy the mountains and camping and hiking and this event 
has definitely contributed to our education.
      I am familiar with your wild foods, but had never heard the term, 
sheep showers.  Never having been around sheep, I don' t know what they 
like to eat, but am supposing they ate this and then the seeds would 
sprout in the midst of their deposits.  I"m wondering from your 
description of the taste if it is in the oxalis (wood sorrell) family of 
plants?  They can have pink or yellow flowers and as a child I used to 
eat them when they came up in our yard.  The foliage has a leaf somewhat 
similar to clover, but the stems are very sour and delicious to chew if 
you like the sour taste.

Love,
Carol