[Granville-Hough] 18 Jan 2009 - Wild Foods

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

Date: Sun, 18 Jan 2009 15:11:40 -0800
From: Granville W Hough <gwhough at oakapple.net>
Subject: 18 Jan 2009 - Wild Foods


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!"




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.