Wild Ozark foods

My husband and I were browsing at Walmart when he pointed to a fruit that looked like a small tomato. "A persimmon!" I said. "But it’s so big. I didn’t know persimmons grew tame, and I sure didn’t expect to see them in the produce department."

Moving from Nebraska to the Ozarks when a child, I had my first experience eating black-eyed peas, squash and poke greens. (I still cook poke greens in the spring when the tiny shoots first pop out of the ground.)

My sister Helen tells of her encounter with persimmons. "The sparselybranched trees grew along the road where we passed daily on our walk to our one-room school house nestled in the woods of oak trees and unknown bushes. I was fascinated by this unusual fruit and anxious to taste it. One day I gingerly picked a plump persimmon from the tree, ready for my first taste of this beautiful pale green fruit, about the size of a tiny egg. My schoolmates gasped as they watched me pick thefruit, and tried to stop me from eating it. But I determined to bite into this green persimmon. Almost instantly my mouth began to pucker and felt like it was full of soap.

Later I found it usually takes a fall frost to ripen persimmons. Then they become a soft orange-pink color and are sweet and quite delicious. This was a hard way to learn to listen to my new friends who were born and raised in Arkansas and knew what they were talking about.

"Another unknown I was exposed to," Helen said, "was the chinquapin. During recess we’d flock to the woods and gather the small nut, stuff our pockets full to haveenough to munch on the rest of the day. The shell was firm, yet thin, so there was little noise when we cracked them. We could eat them during class without Teacher knowing. Using our teeth, we cracked the outer shell and ate this tasty, dark brown morsel inside. These nuts often had worms in them, so we had to inspect each one and we took care not to clutter the floor with our shells." Chinquapin trees may now be extinct; it’s been a long time since I’ve seen one.

Late fall was also the time to gather walnuts, another first for us displaced Nebraskans. Our 350 acre farm was covered with walnut trees, but squirrels had to look elsewhere for food on our land. When we got home from school, Mom would be waiting in the pickup. We kids would jump in the back and off we’d go to pick up walnuts which had fallen on the ground. We’d work till dark, throwing them into the bed of the truck, thenbumpily ride on the nuts back to the house. The nuts were dumped on the grassy driveway and Papa would drive over them with his tractor to make the green hulls come off. Then we’d fill gunnysacks full and Papa would take them to town to sell. We kept a few sacks to crack, and the hard-to-pick-out nut meats were ready for holiday desserts. Walnut trees are getting scarcer, as they are sold and cut to make fine furniture.

Each year my husband brings me a handful of buckeyes, another unfamiliar nut which grows on our farm. The glossy brown nut is enclosed in a spiny bur. Though not edible, after removing the outer shell the buckeye is carried in pockets to bring good luck.

We also have a pawpaw tree. The small edible fleshy fruit is sometimes called "Arkansas banana" because of its banana shape. It makes a good bread. Hazel nuts, pecans and hickory nuts grow in the hills along with wild possum grapes, strawberries, huckleberries and blackberries. The mulberry is the only fruit I’ve seen that grows on a tree. When its miniature red berries are ripe, the tree drops the sweet fruit, a deep blue color.

There’s always plenty of interesting foods that grow naturally in the Ozarks. I wouldn’t want to live any place else in the world.

Marie Putman is a former Gravette resident and regular contributor to the Westside Eagle Observer.