Acorn. The fruit of the oak tree, shaped like a tear drop. Some varieties are edible and can be ground to use as a coffee substitute or mixed with flour and used in bread. In the past, poor farmers added ground acorns to the flour as do, and did, the farmers of southern France, Corsica, northern Spain, Sicily and so on.
In Denmark, good fortune for a farm hand was to become bound over (hæfted) to a good farmer who promised pure flour bread on Sundays. This illustrates how important food was in the scheme of things and compares to the tradition in southern Sweden where a 'good' contact would stipulate that the worker only got fed salmon once a week. On the West coast of Jutland in Denmark it was the frequency with which they were fed salted cod that exercised workers. Unconfirmed reports suggest that among the poorest farmers from Småland in Denmarl and Værmland in Sweden it was common to dry, roast and grind the inner layer of birch bark, a sweet sappy layer, and add it to the flour to make it 'stretch'. This was told to Blaedel-Flajsner in the 1970s but her own attempts to replicate this have not been successful.
