Handed Down - Nevada Arts Council

1995–1996
Washoe Acorn Biscuits:
Madelina Henry and Renee Aguilar
Madelina Henry is a master at making acorn
biscuits, a unique food of the Washoe people.
Madelina, who works as a cook at the Washoe Tribe’s
Senior Center in Dresslerville, grew up watching and
helping her mother and older sister prepare acorns. As
she got older, and her sister could no longer undertake
the long preparation process, the job fell to her and she
has taken it over eagerly.
In this apprenticeship Madelina worked with her
younger cousin Renee Aguilar, who is also her assistant
at the Senior Center. Renee was raised in San Francisco,
but spent the summers in Nevada with her older
Washoe relatives, and moved back permanently in
1982. Her long-standing interest in Washoe traditions
has reasserted itself, and she considers herself very fortunate
to be working with someone as knowledgeable in
the old ways as Madelina is.
As with many traditional art forms, the making of
acorn biscuits requires a long process of preparation.
First of all the acorns must be gathered, and since oaks
don’t grow in Nevada that means a trip over the Sierra
to the foothills in California. The traditional territory
of the Washoe people includes the area around
Lake Tahoe, so they have access to the acorns, either
directly or through trade with the neighboring California
tribes. The acorns must then dry for about a year
before the shells can be cracked off between two rocks
and the meats scraped clean of their reddish inner skin.
Madelina says that ideally dried acorns should be white
when they are ready for pounding.
Set in the lawn behind the Dresslerville Senior Center
is a large flat stone with a shallow indentation. This
“pounding rock” was donated to the center, and serves
as a site for the traditional grinding of acorns into flour
(although some people nowadays use a blender, Madelina
says the resulting biscuits just don’t taste the same).
As Renee sits on the ground with her legs stretched
out on either side of the stone, Madelina pours a handful
of acorns mixed with a little of the already-ground
flour into the indentation. Renee grasps a large rounded
stone and begins dropping it steadily onto the acorns,
and in a short time they are pulverized into coarse flour.
The flour is then put into a close-woven willow
winnowing tray, and with a practiced shaking motion
Madelina makes the coarser grains fall back into the
hole, while the fine meal sticks to the tray. This is then
brushed into a bowl with a stiff brush made of fern root,
and the process begins again with more whole acorns.
Once there is a good quantity of acorn flour ready—“I
don’t make this unless I make a lot of it, because it’s not
worth my time,” Madelina says—it is placed on a clean
cloth over a bed of sand in preparation for leaching with
running water. Acorns have a bitter taste which must be
removed this way, and Madelina also lays cedar boughs
over the flour, which she says adds a good flavor.
After the flour is leached for an hour or so, it is
mixed with more water into a sort of soup, which is
then dropped by large scoopfuls into cool water, where
it gels into rounded biscuits. Neither Madelina nor Renee
know of another tribe that makes such biscuits, but
to them they taste of home. “I crave my acorns,” says
Madelina. “This is soul food.”
Apprentice Renee Aguilar pounds acorns into flour in a
traditional grinding rock as master Madelina Henry looks
on, willow winnowing tray in hand.
Washoe elder Madelina Henry cracks dried acorns with a
rock to remove the meat for pounding into flour.
38