How Not to Cook Acorns

Image: upper bowl, acorn meal; lower plate, partially eaten acorn muffin with apricot raspberry jam.

I’m working on an article about urban foraging in Washington, DC, that is, finding and preparing edible wild plants downtown. Other cities, like Portland, Oregon have extensive urban foraging communities. I have been in contact with a handful of Washington’s urban foragers, but have not yet found a cohesive community. I plan on looking harder.

I have, however, met some interesting people with extensive knowledge of local edible wild plants. Based on my initial research, I’m finding that many of the areas wild plant gatherers look for food in DC’s expansive green areas, like the city’s northeastern and northwestern neighborhoods.

My neighborhood is kind of brown by comparison. Although many wild edible plants grow within a block of my house (including dandelion, chicory, horse mint, wild mint, wood sorrel, and nasturtium), green spaces in my neighborhood are either private landscapes or the grown-over remains of demolished old buildings where many dogs pee often.

I’m also researching whether or not the city sprays its vacant lots with pesticide before I make a ghetto grass salad.

Acorns seemed safe by comparison. They now litter the sidewalk and, it turns out, are not just for squirrels (or pigeons, pigs, deer, mice, rats, and lots of other animals). Humans have been eating acorns for millennia, though today they are not especially popular except in North American Indian and Korean cultures. Acorns are nuts and contain high levels of protein, carbohydrates and fats, and essential minerals. But they are often too bitter to eat without processing. My dog hoovers most everything he finds on the sidewalk including napkins, cigarette butts, diapers, and mysterious lumps but consistently spits out acorns.

Tannins cause the bitterness (the word comes from the Old German “tanna,” which meant oak). Tannin levels vary depending on the species. Most DC oaks are high-tannin red oaks. White oaks’ acorns are reportedly low enough in tannins to eat without leaching away the bitterness. Acorns in my neighborhood are bitter and require a lot of work.

I collected a bag of acorns from a red oak in the Giant parking lot a block away from my house and experimented with various tannin leaching methods outlined on various websites. In all cases, acorns have to be shelled (of course) before eating. Hitting an acorn with a standard hammer squarely at its pointy tip generally splits the shell in two and makes harvesting the nutty innards (called ‘meat’ or ‘nut meat’) pretty easy.

Boiling was recommended by some and discouraged by others. I tried boiling some of my acorns and don’t recommend this because it takes too long and uses a lot of water and energy (both the kind you pay for and your own). According to Wikipedia, boiling unleached acorns may actually make them “unleachable.”

One website written by a Native American noted a friend who leached her acorns in a cloth sack in the back “clean” part of her toilet. He didn’t recommend this because 1) the tannins stain porcelain and 2) nobody really wants to eat anything processed in a toilet. But should you ever be caught in a drought situation or after an apocalypse or siege with little water and only acorns to eat you know what to do.

I found the following process the easiest and least resource-demanding: 1) put acorns directly into food processor after shelling; 2) pulverize into a meal; 3) leach meal by placing it in a wash cloth and rinsing it repeatedly with hot water (requires that you “milk” the wash cloth, which will be permanently stained) and 4) lightly roast on low heat. Mother Earth News recommends using the heat leftover from cooking something else as it dissipates. This is a good idea because acorn meal is pretty fragile and burns easily.

Acorn meal can be used to make bread and muffins. So I tried the following recipe from the blog GroupRecipes.com. I simplified the recipe a little. The original entry was submitted by “julesong.” They're quite tasty -- the acorns make these muffins (or bread) very hearty.

Ingredients

1 cup acorn meal
1 cup flour
2 tablespoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons sugar (I used brown sugar)
1 egg, beaten
1 cup milk
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
2 tablespoons butter, melted

Preparation

1. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees F. Butter a loaf pan.
2. In a large bowl, combine the acorn meal, flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar. Stir well.
3. In a separate bowl, whisk together the egg, milk, and oil, then gradually whisk in the melted butter.
4. To the bowl containing the dry ingredients add the liquid ingredients and stir to combine all,
5. Pour the batter into the prepared loaf pan and bake in 400 degree F oven for 30 minutes.

O Street Market, DC: Great Expectations

Conspicuously dilapidated, clearly historic, and located near a number of housing projects, O Street Market at 7th and O Street in Washington, DC is the kind of project an overly enthusiastic historic preservation graduate student would write their thesis about. O Street Market could easily illustrate the history of DC's Shaw neighborhood, DC's race relations and housing issues, and its urban renewal goals.

But I'm supposed to be blogging about food politics. And my attorney (also my fiance) advises me to be brief, like bloggers do, not long and lecturey, like someone who was once an overly enthusiastic historic preservation graduate student.

The New Old Market

The 1881 market's heyday was in the 1930s and 40s, according to reports from the 1970s. It fronts a major historic route to Maryland farms. According to one account in the late 1970s, produce stalls once lined 7th Street on market days from O Street Market all the way to Florida Avenue (north by several blocks). Today, that's a pretty bleak stretch.

O Street Market has been on the verge of rehabilitation for a while now. It's part of a bigger plan for the site.

http://www.roadsidedevelopment.com/admin/Editor/f1l3s/rd_oSt_marketing.pdf

This plan involves tearing down a Giant supermarket on the other side of the two-block lot, and adding a hotel, rental and senior housing, and condominiums. In the plan, the historic market is a landmark cornerstone, and the market function on the site (in the Giant, to be demolished) is incorporated into the older building.

In general, most everyone is excited about the project. Concerns include the scale of the new development relative to the context, restoring 8th Street (a part of the L'Enfant plan) which was erased in the late 1970s site plan and gentrification issues. The project's architect, Shalom Baranes Associates, has incorporated preservation officials' feedback into the design.

Community Feedback

Can O Street be compared to Capitol Hill's Eastern Market? O Street's rehab has been delayed for some time while Eastern Market was quickly rehabbed after an April 2007 fire. Given Shaw's challenges, and the history of the site, a fairer comparison -- at least when thinking about the ultimate impact of the project -- might be the larger-scale CityVista, a multiuse development in the nearby Mount Vernon Triangle neighborhood.

Though that site doesn't include a landmark building, the overall idea and neighborhood concerns and needs are much more similar to Shaw's than Capitol Hill's. Capitol Hill's public Eastern Market has been in continuous operation since 1873. O Street Market's history has been up and down, and tied into urban renewal plans for Shaw (more on this below).

CityVista's program, including a large grocery store function, (http://www.cityvistadc.com/f_index.php) shows how this scale of development might work in the Shaw neighborhood. CityVista is still very new -- it opened last year -- but a review of blogs focused on living in downtown DC suggests CityVista's Safeway is now the supermarket downtown.

Historic Politics

Forty years ago, development ideas about O Street Market attempted to balance the needs and desires of new (more affluent, white) residents with the needs of existing residents. (Note: Shaw is historically multiracial and middle class with some pockets of poor residents). The building's developer in the late 1970s, James Adkins, proposed flood lights to make new white residents feel comfortable shopping on O Street. This was no simple ribbon cutting.

O Street Market stood closed for over a decade after the April 1968 riots following Martin Luther King's assassination. The Giant was the District's first new supermarket after the riots. ("Old-Style Markets Return," Washington Post, November 29, 1970).

The historic market's reopening, along with the Giant, made many very optimistic. Reporting about the two markets in the late 1970s and 1980 was a mix of nostalgia and ideas about what Shaw needed to do well.

Unfortunately, the good late-1970s ideas for O Street's rehab (including a proposal for a neighborhood kitchen and culinary training) didn't come together exactly as planned. Sales were less than brisk. A 1994 shooting inside the market, resulting in the death of a 15 year old, and 8 wounded, left sales even scanter, and vendors packed up for other markets. The shooting dominated reporting about the historic building after that, even in more recent reports about Roadside Development's plan. The building's roof fell in after a snowstorm in 2003. It's now gutted and fenced off.

As a Shaw resident, I'm maintaining optimism about O Street Market. It's a complicated project, but certainly well worth the wait.

Ate Past: Food, History and Politics

Last month, on a Friday afternoon at 0 and 9th Streets, I thought I heard gunshots. Then I thought I heard sirens. Then I went outside, and saw neighbors looking over toward flashing police cars, and swarms of cops, so asked someone what happened.

He said, "somebody got hit."

I asked, "Hit, someone was hit?"

He said, "somebody got hit."

I wondered if someone had been hit by a car or in a fist fight. I asked another neighbor what happened.

He said, "someone was shot."

Oh.

Turned out, two people had been shot that Friday near the Giant Supermarket on 9th and O Street. I shop there nearly everday. I've been told it's actually pretty safe, and that violence there is generally targeted, gang-related and professional.

That said, I wish buying groceries nearby didn't involve calculated risks.

****

I live on O Street, between 9th and 10th Street NW, in Washington, DC's Shaw neighborhood. More precisely, I live in Naylor Court, which has its own distinct identity. I'm an architectural historian, a writer, an illustrator, and was recently a lobbyist. I think I'm still certified. I don't think it matters. Earlier this year, I made a decision to return to my roots after lobbying for nearly five years with grassroots interests for historic preservation.

I also like food. A lot. My mom was a terrible cook, so I learned how to work a kitchen at an early age. I started with grilled cheese around 1975 and moved on from there.

For six years, I was a freelance writer while working for preservation and history nonprofits in Seattle, which is an excellent, formative place for foodies. When I moved to DC in 2004, culture shock was acute, in part because I wore pantyhose on a regular basis after years of wearing jeans to work, and in part because of DC's food culture.

Seattle's Pike Place Market is iconic, historically, but it's also an inexpensive place to get fresh produce, meat, fish, and other basics in the middle of the workday. DC used to have that, and when the city lost its downtown market to its federal presence in 1930, many were peeved. But not enough.

*****

About a month ago, after the aforementioned shootings and years of consideration, I started researching the politics of food through building and neighborhood history. My first subject: the historic O Street Market, which is on the other side of Giant's parking lot. This posting serves as an introduction to a series of posts featuring what I've learned about that market and others in DC, including the history of street vendors, private markets, local farming, farm routes, and food politics generally.