Poisonous pitfalls can lurk for the novice nut forager

I KNOW of a clump of nutbearing hazel trees in Wharfedale, and this year I managed to gather some of the nuts before they had all been cached away for the winter by local grey squirrels.

Eating the nuts is easy when they are so fresh. You just crack them open and prise out the white flesh.

Finding edible nuts in the British countryside is, however, generally difficult. As far as our commonest trees – the oak and horse chestnut – are concerned, the usual advice is to avoid eating their nuts.

If you have ever sampled an acorn fresh from an oak tree you will know of the bitter, astringent taste from tannins. While they can cause severe gastric upsets and even a damaged liver, extracting nuts from shells and boiling them does render them safe, I am told, and they taste okay when baked with honey and spiced sugar in a granola.

But there is a greater health warning attached to eating raw conkers. I have never dared taste one because they are considered poisonous and, indeed, the Woodland Trust warns they contain a toxin called aesculin which can cause serious illness.

Conkers should never be confused with sweet chestnuts, those sold in shops and usually associated with Christmas stuffing. Sweet chestnut trees are relatively hard to find in the English countryside, but burrlike outer husks and pointed tassels clearly differentiate their nuts from the familiar spiky conkers.

But what do we do with the nuts from beech trees?

A few miles from the Yorkshire coast last month, I came across a magnificent stand of beeches with branches bent under the weight of a fine crop of nuts, known as beech mast. I left them alone because ever since my earliest foraging days with school friends, I have never been sure what to do with beech mast.

I remember we cut through their Velcro-like covering with a penknife to open up the pod and found not a single nut but smaller segments. We vaguely knew that nuts should be roasted, like monkey nuts and Christmas chestnuts, and so set a small fire going in a nearby field. Not one of them turned out to be edible.

Foragers rate beech mast highly for their calorific value, however, because they apparently contain 50 per cent fat and 20 per cent protein.

By comparison, there is seven per cent protein in acorns, which explains why early pig farmers used to prefer their stock to feed under beech rather than oak trees.

Beech nuts do have a faint tannin-like bitterness, however. And although it is considered safe to eat a few raw, gatherers are advised to roast them in the oven if intending to consume in any quantity.

During the Second World War, the nuts were gathered in German villages, roasted and pressed to extract an oil that was used as a butter substitute. Once the oil had been removed, the pulp was ground into flour.