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Honey Dew and Sagebrush Honey

Here is pleasant culinary lore from Swift Paine's Nevada novel Eilley Orrum: "Honey dew from Heaven" the people called the nectar that fell bountifully on the cotton woods in the lower gullies where the people washed the leaves and boiled the sugar into syrup. (This is the same nectar that bees sip for cottonwood honey.) Eilley never did that. She inclined more to the theory of a Gentile (non-Mormon) woodchopper that the "honey-dew" was deposited by tree lice. "Learning from the easy going Indians, she did gather choke cherries and pine nuts. With a pole she would beat the grass green cones from the little trees whose knotted branches stood out in stiff zigzags. Then she would gather her crop into heaps and burn brushwood over them until the resin bedraggling the cones was scorched off, the nuts were slightly roasted and the scales opened. The waxen kernels, sweet and delicious, she would boil into soup as the Washoes showed her. "She got out a jar of sagebrush honey in which wild hyacinths and buttercups were mingled, and gave it to her boarders for their hot cakes."