Beechnut Survival Food

The Beech tree, also known as Fagus Syvatica, is a beautiful tree but it can sustain human life too.  The tree has leaves that range in colour from lime green in spring to dark green in summer. In autumn the leaves dry-up on the tree and turn a beautiful coppery colour.  As this copper color is so distinctive it is much easier to spot a beech tree late autumn than any other season.

 

It is during this time also that the beech’s fruit become ripe. Beech fruit is called a mast. When mature the masts open to reveal three beech nuts that if left unpicked eventually fall to the ground. The nuts themselves are covered in a thin husk which is easy to peel with fingers. Inside you will find the white flesh of the nut which is sweet and delicious to eat.

 

You can also process beechnut into oil. It takes about 500 masts to make a cup of oil.  The younger the leaves are the better this is going to work for you.  You need to somehow mill or grind the leaves finely and then place them in a fine muslin bag and let the oil drip out into a metal tray.  Once you have the oil you can use it for frying or as you would any cooking oil or you can use it to make mayonnaise or a salad dressing. This oil can last for a couple of years or more.

 

You can also make a salad of the very young leaves on the tree.  Although they are a little bitter they are also very refreshing to eat.

 

Beechnut leaves are part of a very old Celtic recipe called Spring Fritters. This is 1 egg, beech leaves, a bit of beer, a cup of flour all rolled up into a batter that is cookie like. It is then dumped into oil and fried to make fritters.  Along with beech leaves the ancient Celts added cleavers, nettles that had been boiled first to remove the stings, gorse flowers, hawthorn flowers, broom flowers and varieties of nettle.

 

The Celts also made a “noyau” out of beech leaf.  A noyau is a cordial that is made from alcohols, sugar and any type of herb, bark, root or leaf.  Beechnut Tree Noyau tastes best made with equal parts of gin and brandy, a handful of young beech leaves and a great deal of sugar.

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Gathering Wild Asparagus

Wild asparagus is one of the most delicious of the survivalist foods that you could hope to ever find.  It is wonderful to eat lightly grilled over a wild fire. In fact, survivalist Euell Gibbons once wrote an entire book about this activity called “Stalking The Wild Asparagus” which was all about feeding his family by foraging edibles in the 1930s.

 

They first start appearing in the spring but can be quite hard to find because they are small plants. They can start appearing as early as the first week of April. The thick wild asparagus stocks grow all summer. By the fall they are quite easy to spot because the delicious thick stocks start turning orange. This makes them stand out quite starkly from the look of other vegetables.

 

Usually they grow in clumps however if the asparagus is tall enough to see from far away this also usually means that it is too tough to eat.  What you want to find is the younger, tender shoots that grow at the base of the older clumps.

 

You can find it growing across the United States but especially in the central and Southern states where it flourishes by the roadside. In fact all summer long you can see people picking wild asparagus by the highways.  One thing you need to be very careful of is contamination with pesticides especially if the asparagus is located in a space near the highway that seems a bit more manicured.

Generally wild asparagus has much thinner stalks than the domesticated kind but you can luck out and find patches boasting very thick stalks.  Wild asparagus is also a bit more sinewy and woody than the cultivated kind.  When it is very mature it boasts tiny feathery fronds that look a bit like angel ferns.

 

If you are in a survivalist situation and you have found a patch of asparagus it is very important not to overpick the cluster because it will not grow back.  If the stalks growing back seem to be a lot thinner than what you were picking earlier on in the season then it is time to scale back a bit or you could lose it as a source of food altogether.

 

Asparagus is very versatile and you can steam it and broil it out in the wild.  A good survival dish to make in the wild is some beef jerky or dried sausage, tomato sauce or chopped tomatoes and wild asparagus cooked up together.

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