table talk / By Malcolm Terence

Acorn Soup

A feast in Orleans

(Nov. 18, 2010)  First, a confession: I have many times pretended to enjoy acorn soup. The first time may have been at the table of Bessie Tripp, the legendary Karuk woman who lived to be over 100. She was only in her 90s then. I said the soup was perfect, then I asked for seconds of the fried eels.

Sometimes the acorn soup was too bitter, other times nearly tasteless, but more than anything it seemed foreign, although, on reflection, it’s me, a white person, who’s the foreigner in Klamath River country.

Deborah Hostler serves soup made from tanoak acorns. Hostler said traditional native cooks, instead of a stainless pot, would have used baskets woven tightly enough to be water tight. PHOTO BY MALCOLM TERENCE

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More recently I feigned enthusiasm at the supper after Pikiawish ceremonies just below Orleans. I watched to see if any of the Natives around me really liked it, and two young men from Hoopa, their plates still full of delicious salmon, got up to see if there were seconds of acorn soup.

Since then four cooks prepared a special dinner at the town’s Mid-Klamath Watershed Council (MKWC, which we all call Mick-Wick) and introduced me to acorn soup so tasty that I became a convert. They served the kinds of food the residents of Orleans traditionally ate: salmon roasted on stakes, bay laurel nuts (called peppernuts) toasted black as coffee beans, venison stew, seaweed and acorn soup.

MKWC has long held monthly fundraising suppers with local chefs. The cuisine is typically varied, sometimes exotic and usually first-rate. But this dinner was going to be without precedent. Four chefs — Clarence and Deborah Hostler, Frank Lake and Luna Latimer along with many helpers — prepared what Clarence called “good food” from his Hoopa childhood.

The dinner was in a community hall called Panámniik, the town of Orleans’ original name. A smoky, unfamiliar but inviting aroma suffused the building as I entered. In the undersized kitchen I found Charlie Thom, a well-known Karuk elder, stirring a big cast-iron pot of peppernuts. Someone teased him not to burn them and the cooks laughed. Later Laverne Glaze, another Karuk elder and organizer among native basketweavers, told me they were best when toasted very dark. When I tasted them, I had to agree.

Outside, between the building and the Klamath River, Clarence Hostler tended a fire to heat rocks and Frank Lake carved redwood stakes to roast salmon. The rocks, Frank said, were basalt found on the banks of the Klamath and Trinity rivers tumbled to a smooth black from thousands of years of river cycles. These are cooking rocks. Ordinary rocks might split or even explode.

When the rocks glowed a faint pink, Clarence moved them into a large kettle of tanoak acorn meal, which his wife Deborah had carefully leached with spring water. The kettle bubbled and sputtered volcanically and Deborah stirred with a hand-carved paddle. More rocks sent great clouds of steam to fill the air.

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