Know your nuts

Brazil Nuts

By New Year the tree was long gone to the great arboretum in the sky, hopefully your mum had finally run out of turkey recipe ideas and the retinue of Christmas relatives had made their way home. However, there will be one reminder of Christmas that lingers after all these others are long gone, one thing that lurks on the coffee table unloved and forgotten, I am of course talking about nuts.

I certainly consider them essential to the festive household despite the fact that I probably eat no more than three or four of the well protected little morsels across the whole of the Christmas season. Now this column, as ever, was triggered by a friend’s favourite fact shared over a mulled wine in my local: the Brazil nut is the most radioactive food.

Perhaps we should start with the least glamorous and most familiar of nuts: the humble peanut. It’s actually a pretty interesting candidate - for starters it’s the only nut that’s grown underground. Peanut ‘pegs’ grow down from the bush into the ground where the peanuts mature.

Once they’ve been dug up though, the majority of peanuts are turned into peanut butter: it’s the number one use of peanuts in the US. As an interesting aside, "surveys show" that men prefer smooth peanut butter while women prefer crunchy.

Some people are not such a fan of either though, particularly those who suffer from Arachibutyrophobia: the fear of getting peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth. However, having learnt all this useful stuff about peanuts it turns out that we’ve been labouring in vain as the peanut is an impostor. It’s merely masquerading as a nut and is in fact a legume! The cheek!

The peanut is merely masquerading as a nut and is in fact a legume! The cheek!

To move on to safer ground then let us retreat to the Brazil nut that got us started. The interesting thing about the Brazil nut is how it grows. The nuts in their hard little shells that you get on the Christmas coffee table don’t occur like that on the tree, instead the seed pods are the size of coconuts and contain clusters of 12 to 25 Brazil nuts. The trees themselves are pretty impressive too and live for between 500 and 800 years and they can produce 300 pods a year.

My personal favourite nut is the pistachio, naturally intriguing for being green, they get their names from the Italian version of the Persian word, pistah, meaning nut. As well as being green the pistachio is unique for its semi-opening shell which earns it that rather charming name of the ‘smiling pistachio’ in Iran and the ‘Happy nut’ in China.

And finally we turn our attention to the pine nut. Now I don’t know whether I’m just being dim here but it’s never occurred to me to put two and two together and surmise that pine nuts come out of pine cones, but apparently they do. The cones have to be dried so they open up and then the nuts are removed.

I must admit though that I’m now torn between the edible uses of the pine cone and the fact that they make very good barometers: when there’s moisture in the air the scales become flexible and the cone opens up. Come to think of it I might just plant a tree and have an endless supply of both snacks and barometers.

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