STEP FOUR: Making acorn flour from the cleaned acorns What John Smith just said was those who survived took care of themselves and prepared for the winter by gathering all kinds of things. Of 500 within 6 months after departure, there remained not past 60 men, women and children, most miserable and poor creatures and those preserved for the most part, by roots, herbs, acorns, walnuts, berries, and now and then a little fish. They kept well and we reckoned we had the whole winter to continue working on them.Ĭould survive on acorns for a whole winter? The rest we finished in the evenings.Īcorns in various stages of the process were stored in the cellar. She also tended the previous day’s sorting, rinsing, boiling, grinding, and drying, and did as much acorn preparation as possible. The one at home fetched water from the well, tidied the cottage and prepared whatever provisions we received from the Company Store. In the mornings, two of us scoured the woods and river’s edge, while one stayed behind to watch Janey. We had comfort in our routine, even as the politics left us uneasy. I laughed at her child’s enthusiasm, for this was essentially what we brought each time. “Walnuts and ’corns!” she said, peering over my shoulder into the basket. I set my basket down quickly to scoop her up, kissing her cheek. Before I could reply, Janey ran over to me, throwing her arms around my waist. She brushed it away with the back of a wet hand, but it tumbled down again. A strand of hair drooped across her eyes. Maggie glanced up as we came in, her round face lit in a smile. Janey stood beside her on the stool, helping. A kettle of acorns boiled over a fire that also warmed the autumn chill from the cottage. On a piece of muslin lay the ones she had already washed. She had a bowl filled with water on the table and was swishing acorns around in it. Tempie and I scurried back to the house to find Maggie rinsing yesterday’s finds. My sister and I took the attitude of, “We just can’t mess this up! We’ve worked too hard already!”įrom Dark Enough to See the Stars in a Jamestown Sky I thought I had ruined them but as it turned out, boiling and draining them as many times as we did cleaned out the burnt taste. They scorched, and it smelled like burnt coffee. The first time I put the nuts on to boil, I figured I could leave them there to just, you know, simmer. I think that soaking the acorns as much as we did soaked out the “sweet, nutty taste” we were supposed to have. Later, we’d feel guilty and come back to it. We’d boil them three or four times and when we got tired we would just let them soak in luke-warm water. My first guess was this would take about an hour. Even that step was more difficult than I could have suspected. But first, I had to “coarsely grind” them. The point was to cook out the tannic acid which gave the nuts a very bitter taste. In this next step we were supposed to add water to the acorns and boil them. By the time we were done, we both had blisters and acorn shells up our nails. “This is mind-numbing,” Kerry said after 20 minutes of tedious work.Īnd it was. Then, using a mortar and pestle, I cracked the acorns and passed them to Kerry to shell. This step only took about about 45 minutes but it felt a lot longer.First we poured the nuts into a bowl of water, and the ones that floated we pulled out and threw away becuase that meant that the bugs had hollowed them out.Īcorns are heavy and solid and most of them sunk. STEP TWO: Pulling the meat out of the shells If only I had known that was the easy part. (beween the squirrels and the dog!) but Mom found a ton in the back yard. She said they could get about a bushel an hour.Īt first, I had trouble finding the acorns It took me about ten minutes, but in Mom’s book the women would gather all day. “Well,” she said, “I’m so busy, why don’t you and Kerry do it?”īeing homeschooled, my little sister Kerry and I got out of school that day to try our hand at surviving the winter. “Sure.” I said warming up to the idea, “We could try to do it just like Joan did!” “It would be neat,” Mom said that morning, “to actually try to make acorn flour, don’t you think?” She researched acorn flour, and in her book she wrote about how Joan, Tempie, and Maggie gathered the acorns, shelled them, boiled them, milled them, and ate them. Mom thinks that this is how they survived through that first terrible winter in Jamestown. In the book my mom wrote, Dark Enough to See the Stars in a Jamestown Sky, she had Joan, Temperance, and Maggie (three women struggling to survive in the Virginia wilderness) making acorn flour to add to the slowly dwindling supply of food. One day, it was a nice fall day, I realized that I had nothing better to do with my time than make acorn flour for my mom.
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