"What are acorns for?" asked the eight-year-old, making as if he was going to nibble at one of the hundreds which the high winds had brought down. "Not for eating, anyway," he was told. They went to the growing of more oak trees. "How?" was the next question. The answer being that when ripe you put each one into a pot of earth or into the ground, and next spring up comes a little oak tree. He lost interest.
In certain countries, where oak was abundant, pigs depended on acorns for autumn and winter feed. Trees, it is said, were planted around the fields and in the forests for this purpose. The right to graze your pigs on this fruit of the autumn was known in England as pannage. But were acorns ever used for human consumption? Roasted and ground in lieu of coffee, we have heard, in wartime Germany. But Ralph Whitlock, in a book The Oak (Allen and Unwin, 1985), writes: "It may be, however, that even in the 1860s some of them were ground or pounded into meal for mixing with wheat flour for bread, an old-time practice for eking out supplies in times of scarcity." His "may be" was of England, of course.
It is interesting that Eugene Weber's book, recently quoted here, Peasants into Frenchmen, in which he details great misery among the same peasants even well into the 19th century, gives various near-starvation diets, including all sorts of mixtures for making gruels or breads, but never mentions acorns as human food. And there was no shortage of oaks in many parts of France. Cereal with chestnuts (the sweet variety) was common for bread-making. Whitlock makes the point, incidentally, that acorns falling green and unripe in autumn have the same effect on ruminant animals - only graver - as do green apples on small boys. If the animals eat too many green acorns without hay, grass or other fibrous material, they may die. To show the depths to which the French on the land sometimes had to go, Weber tells us that the ground-up shells of nuts were frequently put in with the flour to make for more bread.
Incidentally, unless the winds continue with gale-force blasts, this year's crop of acorns on one old oak is likely to be the biggest in 30 years.