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There’s no middle ground. You’ll hate them, or adore them. Our grandmother insisted they tasted like soap. On our tongue, they’re like the warm, autumn sun, drifting orange leaves, and distant wood smoke. Whatever disputations of the palate, though, one indisputable point is that every October, they cause the forest floors of much of Missouri to turn black with gold.
Black walnuts. Oily, pungent, deliciously fat. Perfect baked in banana bread, studded in pancakes, atop ice cream. We’d eat ‘em scattered on our Frosted Flakes if we could afford them. Which is the problem. As with that other dark and seasonal delicacy, prices for black walnuts are truffle-ishly intimidating. In groceries, little packages of small, crumbled, not particularly fresh kernels, can set you back about the same price per pound as veal. We’re always looking for a bargain on them. So when we were ambling along last Saturday afternoon on a winding, two-lane asphalt backroad to the west of Cape Girardeau and we saw the sign soliciting potential walnut sellers, it had our attention. We figured if they were buying, they might also be selling. So we followed a gravel path up to the big pole barn structure that is headquarters for First Fruits.
“Can you wait about five minutes?” the guy asked. He’d walked out to meet us in the parking lot; we’d told him why we were there. He introduced himself as Mike Edmunds. He’s managing the place.
We’d wait a lot longer for that for black walnuts. So we followed Edmunds into the building. We were expecting a rustic sort of scenario. Or maybe a diminutive army of obedient, well-trained squirrels, scurrying about, cracking the nuts and picking out those delectable meats with their tiny, nimble paws. We weren’t expecting a state o’ the art computer driven Satake SCA Closed Circuit Aspirator (at right). (Then again, who would be?) Nevertheless, there it was, churning away. It’s a machine normally used to separate chaff from rice. The rice cascades from a hopper, past an infra-red light that can detect anything that doesn’t look sufficiently rice-like. When it does find something that doesn’t belong, a puff of air blasts it out, allowing the rice to fall into a tub below. Seriously. About a bazillion grains of rice go flying past on the conveyor belts, along with little rocks, bits of rice straw, bottle caps, Cubs fans; who knows what’s in a just-harvested crop of rice. And these magic lights can pick all that out from the grains of rice. Pretty amazing. Anyway, somebody figured what would work for rice would do the same for black walnuts. Good thing; hand-picking the shell fragments from the walnut meats is only slightly less tedious than Susan Sarandon guest-hosting on The View. Overlook even a pinhead-sized chunk of shell and you’ll regret it. Black walnut shell shards are not only hard enough to crack molars, they taste like you’ve just licked the oil pan of a ’79 Pacer.
The machine kept whirring as Edmunds talked with us; the rejected shell chips kept skittering into a bucket behind it; in front, the black walnut meats—our black walnut meats—kept piling up like the steel balls in the bin of a pachinko game. The smell of black walnuts is earthy, musty, rich. Even after a year in the freezer, their aroma is spectacular. There at First Fruits, sniffing them only an hour after they’d come from the shell, it’s like the heavy, wonderful nose of some, just-uncorked Bordeaux.
We were at the moment, Edmunds explained, at the happy end of the black walnut processing process. That process, of separating black walnut meats from their shell, is labor intensive. (Translation: hulling and picking out a pound of black walnuts makes a 16-hour shift in a Third World sweatshop seem like an afternoon at Epcot.) In our callow youth, to satisfy our own addiction, we gathered a wheelbarrow-full one autumn and set about separating hull from shell, then shell from nutmeat. We ended up with a paltry cup of meats and blistered fingers stained brown for a couple of weeks. First Fruits has streamlined things. Walnuts are collected, still in their hulls, either lime green or already inky and crumbly, and tossed into a tumbler swirling in a constant spray of water. A few minutes there strips the hulls; the walnuts still in their black, sharply grooved shells, are spread on racks (see left) to dry so they won’t mildew. Then they go into cardboard boxes, stacked high in the main building—where Edmunds and other workers (and, we still suspect, some very gifted and adroitly-pawed squirrels) will spend the winter cracking them and running them through the aforementioned magic Satake machine.
“In the past couple of years, we’ve gone through, 10 to 12 thousand pounds every fall,” Edmunds says, “but it’s still early in the season this year for buying. We won’t know how many thousands of pounds we’ll have until probably the end of this month.”
What Edmunds does know is that the black walnuts that he’s readying for us are not your standard wild black walnuts.
“The average wild black walnut is about 8% meat,” Edmunds explains. Meaning the rest is just shell—although hardly waste, as we soon discovered. First Fruits, on the other hand, is currently processing their own crop, which can be as much as 30% meat. They come from black walnut cultivars, growing in orchards right around the corner from the First Fruits operation, on land owned by a Cape Girardean who has a twin thing for tonsils and trees.
Richard Martin is an ear, nose & throat physician in Cape Girardeau. When he’s not diagnosing sinusitis, he’s enjoying a couple of hundred acres out on Highway 25, between Dutchtown and Gordonville that he owns, a lot of it covered with trees. Black walnut trees. A few years ago, Martin hired Mike Edmunds, who attends the same church, to trim trees and clear brush and look after the land. Edmunds noticed the ground littered with walnuts; he convinced the doctor to go into the black walnut business. It’s their third year of operations. Edmunds took us out behind First Fruits to show us, coming up in neat rows on the hillsides below, several more acres of trees, promising future crops. Given the Biblical name of the company, we felt sort of Solomonic, (“I went down into the garden of nuts to see the fruits of the valley…” Song of Solomon, 6:11) We were distracted, though: Even if your best walnuts are 30% “dainty meats,” (Proverbs, 23: 6,), that’s still 70% shell. What do you do with all those, we asked.
Guess what they do? Go ahead, guess. You won’t get it. Not in a million years. Here’s a hint: Do you know Nacny Zieman? Think of her, as Edmunds tells us, as “the Martha Stewart of quilting.” And sewing. And embroidery. She’s even got a show on PBS, “Sewing With Nancy,” that plays about 3:00 am. Does that help? No? Well, turns out there are a heck of a lot of quilters, sewers, and embroiderers around. And they all use pincushions. And it turns out all those pincushions are stuffed with finely ground black walnut shells.
“We an official source for Nancy’s Notions,” Edmunds as he took us over to a big bin of the shells, pulverized into the texture of coffee grounds. Go on her site and you’ll find if there’s a needle and thread involved, Nancy’s got it covered. Including her signature pincushions. And every one of them is filled with ground black walnut shells from First Fruits.
Not only is Edmunds selling to Nancy—“I recently visited 24 quilting shops in Iowa,” he explains—“and 22 of them bought fine-ground shells from me for their own cushions,” he’s also peddling the nut meats to a growing list of enthusiastic fans. Andy Ayers, whose Eat Here St. Louis company is supplying restaurants with local fare, has tapped First Fruits. In fact, the nut meats we didn’t buy that day, some of them, anyway, were bound for a special delivery to Ayers.
With the business growing faster than those trees out in the orchard, First Fruits could quickly become one of the entrepreneurial success stories of the state. Our advice to them: Give some thought to the trained squirrels.
First Fruits is located near Cape Girardeau, 1.5 miles North of Dutchtown on Highway 25, and will be open every weekend in October, but Edmunds suggests you give him a call before visiting: 573-450-6701.
