siOBX; - Smithsonian Institution

48 BUREAtr OF AMEUICAir ETHNOLOGY [Bull.10S
Mortars for pounding corn into meal were anciently made by
burning hollows in the side of a prone log, a fanner being used to
direct the course of the fire, but after axes and chisels were introduced
by the whites, they set sections of trees on one end and hollowed
out the other end with tools. Corn, hickory nuts, and wild
potatoes, as well as meat, were ground up in these mortars. Hick-
cry wood was the kind out of which they were usually made because
it conveys the best taste to the food. Failing that, they employed
oak, though it gives food a puckery taste. Beech could be used
but it was scarce, but some woods were not used because of the bad
taste they communicate, in particular maple, which gives a taste
" sufficiently bad to ruin one's stomach."
They had corncribs measuring not over 8 by 10 feet, each with a
single entrance. They were raised fairly high above the ground so
that snakes could not seek refuge there and sting someone before they
could be gotten rid of.
Hickory nuts were gathered in summer and the oil extracted from
them was added to corn foods as a seasoning, though the meats were
sometimes put in whole. To extract the oil they parched the nuts
until they cracked to pieces and then beat them up until they were as
fine as coffee grounds. They were then put into boiling water and
boiled for an hour or an hour and a half, until they cooked down to a
kind of soup from which the oil was strained out through a cloth.
The rest was thrown away. The oil could be used at once or poured
into a vessel where it would keep a long time.
Walnuts were little used for food. Very little use was made of
acorns and no oil was extracted from them. Sometimes they cooked
pin oak acorns with hominy but these often caused cramps.^^
Soda or lye was made by burning pea pods. Some day when no
wind was stirring to blow the resultant product away they set fire
to a pile of pods and allowed the resulting ashes to settle in water.
The lye from this was used until it became sour. Lye of different
colors was made by the simple expedient of using different colored
pods. Meat was sometimes beaten until it was tender, when it was
added to hulled corn and the whole boiled for a considerable period,
after which the lye was added and the whole boiled again for from
15 to 40 minutes.
My informant did not remember ever having seen bread made
out of persimmons, but they had persimmon beer (not, of course,
aboriginal) and a kind of persimmon soup in which the fruit was
mixed with venison or beef. There were two kinds of wild plum,
one of which does not ripen until late in the fall, and there is a
wild crabapple. In ancient times they had no peaches.
s='Acorn oil was probably used more extensively in olden times. See p. 38.