North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Lucky Pittman <lucky.pittman@murraystate.edu>]

At 06:47 PM 12/5/2003 -0500, Doc Lisenby wrote:
> Heck
> Lucky, I used Donna's trick.  I dried my 'simmons in the old SUV
> which I can't afford to drive because of the gas prices.  You
> haven't been up there so long that you don't have an old car in your back
> yard, have you? The folks in Alabama will disown you.
Yeah, I know.  My wife doesn't have those WT
leanings like myself.  No extra cars around my place, though my
truck looks like it oughta be up on blocks out back - the kids don't want
me picking them up from school/practice, especially if I've got the bed
full of bagged leaves I picked up while cruising the residential
neighborhoods.  ;>)
My dad has cut back, though - I don't think there are but two 'extra'
vehicles in the yard back home - and one of them actually runs! - but my
old '61 Rambler station wagon IS out there in the barnyard somewhere,
with a black cherry tree growing up between the bumper and the grille.

Hey, I tried my hand at making some 'hickory syrup' this weekend, after
thinking about something Donna had told me about a local restaurant in
the Cookeville area that's famous for its 'hickory bark butter'.
I'd been saving all my hickory nutshells after cracking and picking out
the nutmeats; had about a gallon/gallon and a half of good clean shell
pieces, with a few fragments of nutmeat still clinging in there in
some.  Took a dozen or so freshly collected mockernut nuts, crunched
'em with my vise-grips and pitched them in the pot, along with the hulls
from 3 or 4 of those nuts(still partially green).  Also pitched in a
couple of small pieces of shagbark hickory bark - the restaurant Donna
told me about makes theirs exclusively with hickory bark, but I didn't
know what effect lichens and poison ivy rootlets might have on the flavor
or reaction from consumers.
Covered the nuts/hulls/bark with a couple of gallons of water, brought it
to a boil, and simmered it all day long, then scooped out the chunks and
strained through clean cloths - twice.  
Ended up with about 6 cups of aromatic light brown liquid.  Stirred
in 3 cups of sugar, and cooked it down to about 3-3.5 cups of thin
syrup.
Looked at Donna's 'recipe' this morning, and I see that I probably should
have used more sugar.  May have to add some more sugar and cook
again to get it thick enough to work well when I whip it up into
butter.  Donna indicated that the recipe from the restaurant calls
for 5 lbs of butter to 1 pint of thick hickory bark syrup.
I'll report back on this when I get a chance to whip up some butter with
it.  Probably ought to write it up for POMONA. and the NNGA
Nutshell.

Lucky Pittman
USDA Zone 6
Hopkinsville, KY