by Curt Kovener
November rains always bring cold. With recent and predicted rains bringing chills to my bones, I opted to spend time inside in the quiet of the wilderness retreat.
I have been trying to collect some of those large hickory nuts with thin hulls and thin shells from my secret honey hole but have been stymied by insects.
This must be the year of the insect: 17-year cicadas this spring, tomato hornworms that eat not only my Romas but also Chipotle peppers this summer. And now I have found out about a critter called the pecan weevil.
I have only seen photos of this pest (it does it’s dirty work high up in the trees). It is about 3/8” long body has a 3/8” curved snout. Early in the summer, when hickory nuts, pecans and acorns are young and forming shells, this weevil pierces a hole in the soft nut shell with its proboscis then turns around and lays an egg in the forming fruit.
Through the remainder of the summer, the nutshell heals and hardens while the egg hatches and the grub dines on the hickory nut. Just about October and time for the hickory nut to drop to the ground, the worm gnaws its way out of the shell and hull to burrow into the ground and pupate into another weevil.
Very few of the hickory nuts I collected this year did not have the telltale 1/8” hole left by a departing weevil grub.
Fortunately, I remembered some hickory nuts I had picked up last year and stored in the freezer. After letting my nuts warm up, I began the tedious project of getting enough of the main ingredient for a Thanksgiving hickory nut pie.
I stayed warm and dry sitting in the wilderness living room with a modified pair of side-cut pliers and snipped away at the hickory shells.
And I find the process beneficial; it gives me time to think about life, the events of the week, problems that need a solution, or to just be philosophical.
After a forceful squeeze cleaved the nut in half, then came the job of snipping away the shell from the nutmeat. Sometimes it gives up willingly, sometimes it is more stubborn. Some refused to yield entirely. “Kind of like we humans”, I thought.
Sometimes the initial split revealed healthy fully developed fruit; sometimes nothing but dark, moldy withered insides. The outside of the nut looked good but sometimes what was inside was not. I will leave it up to you to draw any human analogy.
To keep the tooth breaking pieces of shells out of the pie, my production efficiency must remain rather low as I focus on quality control. When I get my 8-ounce plastic butter container filled, there is enough for a pie. But I frequently give the cup a lengthy shake which settles the contents and makes room for more.
A snip here, a snap there and sometimes a full quarter of a nut, sometimes small pieces & crumbs go into the cup. But like the tortoise & hare of Aesop’s fable, slow & steady fills the hickory nut cup.
The pie, however, gets devoured much faster.