Have you noticed that beech trees this year, are, in many cases, absolutely laden with fruit? This was particularly impressive at Sally Walker's, Fernhill, Sandyford, Dublin and at the entrance to The Moynalty Steam Threshing Festival last Sunday. Children sometimes eat the nuts. Tasty. It was a surprise to read in a book on trees, published in 1849, that their use extended beyond feeding the pigs for which acorns were also used.
During the last war and for some time after, the kernels were widely used on the continent for making oil. An Irish newspaper correspondent who remembers meeting a young boy out in the woods above Heidelberg, about 1946 collecting beech nuts for his mother, learned for the first time that when boiled, oil from the kernels floated to the top and was used for culinary purposes as you would olive oil, and so on. Then, only the other day, looking over a book on trees which has been on the shelves for a long time, there is evidence of this oil. It was known in Britain but was not used.
The writer Rev C. A. Johns in The Forest Trees of Britain (1849) tells us that "in France an excellent oil is manufactured from them, which is extensively employed both for culinary purposes and for burning. In Silesia it is used by the country people instead of butter. A similar application of beech mast has been projected in England, but it never appears to have been carried into effect". By the way, its use for burning presumably refers to fuelling oil lamps.
Another use for beech is that its twigs are, or were, much used for smoking herrings. And beech wood is preferred to every other wood for making the wooden shoes called sabots. Beech woods are good places to find mushrooms of fungi known as Morels, likewise the truffle, the great prize of them all. In other days beech leaves were used to stuff mattresses. A long time ago. Buckinghamshire, the writer says, owes its name to beeches or Buchen. Well, it says here, "the name Beech is of northern origin: Bak in Swedish and Russian, and Buche in German. The beech mast used to be known as buck in England". It's a very detailed book. Full of oddities. In two volumes, good, odd reading.