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It is called the mockernut because while the nut is large, usually larger than the shellbark, the kernel is very small and difficult to take out of the thick shell. =Pignut= I will italicize the pignut because, though I have never eaten it, I once tried to, and the first taste was all-sufficient. Some writers tell us that the flavor is sweet or slightly bitter.
The mocker-nut, with seven or nine leaflets, a hard, thick-shelled nut, and leaflets and twigs very downy when young, and strongly odorous. The pignut, with three, five or seven narrow leaflets, small, thin-shelled fruit and a pretty hard nut.
It might be returned to you if you had behaved yourself meanwhile and had not whispered, thrown spit balls, or pinched the little girl who sat next to you. There were two kinds of walnut trees in the neighborhood; the common name of one was shagbark, of the other pignut.
Six kinds of clovers and vetches; and besides, dandelion, and rattle, and oxeye, and sorrel, and plantain, and buttercup, and a little stitchwort, and pignut, and mouse-ear hawkweed, too, which nobody wants. Why? Because they are a sign that I am not a good farmer enough, and have not quite turned my Wild into Field. What do you mean?
The shagbark was the walnut of the market, a nut with a rich, oily kernel; the pignut was smaller with a very thick shell and correspondingly small meat, hard to separate from the shell. They were of little worth, not salable and we gathered them only when the other kind was scarce. It took a hard frost, several times repeated, to loosen them from the tree. We often clubbed them down.
"Not very much, I am afraid, for it is sometimes called the bitter pignut, and even boys will not eat it, while squirrels refuse to feed on it when any other nut can be found. The shell of this nut is so thin that it can be broken in the fingers, but, as no one cares to break it, it is safer than many a thicker shell. It is intensely bitter, and well deserves its name.
It was the decidedly bitter kind that I found lying temptingly clean and white under the tree. The thin outer husk of the pignut is not much larger than the nut. It is broader at the top than at the stem, where it narrows almost to a point. The husk does not open as freely as that of the other hickory-nuts.
Of other hickories I know little, for the false shagbark, the mockernut, the pignut, and the rest of the family have not been disclosed to me often enough to put me at ease with them. There are to be more tree friends, both human and arborescent, and more walks with the doctor and the camera, I hope!
In its general appearance it resembles the shellbark, as well as in the fullness of its foliage and the size of its leaves. 'White-heart hickory' is a name often given to this species, because the wood is supposed, when young, to be whiter than that of any of the others," "Pignut is another beautiful name," said Malcolm, who was disposed to be critical. "Do pigs ever eat the nuts, Miss Harson?"
Next to smell came taste, and the children knew the taste of everything they saw or touched, from pennyroyal and flagroot to the shell of a pignut and the letters of a spelling-book the taste of A-B, AB, suddenly revived on the boy's tongue sixty years afterwards. Light, line, and color as sensual pleasures, came later and were as crude as the rest.
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