Piñon - Manna from the Heavens

She was laying in her hammock in the late afternoon sun, taking a nap. A few birds were whistling. In her dream it was hailing. She could feel it hit her face and bare arms. Wiping it off, she woke up, realizing that whatever hit her was neither wet nor cold. Her eyes still closed, she could hear different sounds coming from falling, yet unidentified objects. The wind picked up and a unique, short lasting symphony of sounds was created all around her. Then the wind dissipated. It turned still again with the exception of a raven croaking. She finally opened her eyes, too curious to discover what was sent by the heavens. On her chest laid a few piñon nuts. She had forgotten about them. The last time she checked the cones where still tight shut and covered with divinely smelling pine pitch. “They must have all of a sudden ripened and opened up,” she thought. Falling on the ground they were hitting hard surfaces of metal, wood, chimes creating this music of the spheres she had just heard.

Not too long ago something similar had happened to her on a trip to the mountains. Squirrels had climbed up pine trees and thrown the cones down to the ground to pick them up and hide the stash for the coming winter. 

This thought gave her an idea. She got out of her hammock, went inside to grab a bag and started to pick the piñon nuts herself, knowing the protein value of this little nut. Also the cones require two years to mature. Not every year will the crop be so abundant. She suddenly had a feeling of déjà vu.

Pine-nut harvest has for ever been a great social time of the year, bringing people together to gather this staple for winter food. Often they would pull the cones from the trees in the early autumn before they had fully ripened and dropped.

Using poles, the men would beat the trees to get the cones to fall. One could wait for the cones to open later on, use a stone hammer or so to brake them open to collect the seeds or roast them around hot coals, turning them often, which would open them up. The other, more laborious way of collecting the pine nuts was to pick the seeds from the forest floor after the cones had dried and opened on the tree. 

Once the seeds were removed from the cones, they were roasted to then be stored in woven sacks or pits, or ground into a flour.

For the flour they were placed onto a grinding stone, the metate. They were lightly pounded with a mano until all of the shells would had cracked free the inner fruit.

The same process with the grinding stone and the mano would turn the fruit of the nut into meal or flour.

This was indeed a manna from the heavens.