FOOD RESOURCE COLLEGE OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SCIENCES, OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY
WALNUT, AMERICAN WALNUT, Juglans ruperstris, var. major
Grimes, William. 2004. Eating Your Worlds. Oxford University Press.
is the large, wrinkled, edible seed of a deciduous tree, consisting of two halves contained within a hard shell that is enclosed in a green fruit.
- ORIGIN Old English walh-hnutu, from a Germanic compound meaning 'foreign nut'.
Ward, Artemas. 1923. The Encyclopedia of Food. New York, Number Fifty, Union Square.
is the nut of a fleshy-husked fruit borne by a large tree extensively cultivated in many parts of the world. Those always implied commercially by the simple title of "walnut" are of varieities of Juglans regia, indigenous to the mountains regions of Greece and eastward to the Himalayas. They were imported from England and now are called English walnuts.
Excerpted and Modified from Kavasch, Barrie. 1979. Native Harvests. Recipes and Botanicals of the American Indian. Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, New York.
Black walnuts produce nuts, tough to crack. The nut butter can be prepared by smashing the husked nuts and boiling in water until the nutmeats and oils rise to the surface and can be skimmed off, while the shell pieces settle to the bottom of the pot. The oil can then be separated from the meats, which can, in turn, be dried and used as a flour.
Niethammer, Carolyn. 1974. American Indian Food and Lore. Macmillian Publishing Co., Inc., New York.
ALSO CALLED: American walnut. SCIENTIFIC NAME: Juglans rupestris, var. major HABITAT AND DESCRIPTION: These native nut trees are found at elevations of 3,500 feet to 7,000 feet along streams and washes in Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico, and in warm areas of California. They are commonly found near cottonwood and sycamore trees. The tree sometimes grows as high as 50 feet and provides good shade. The nutmeats are enclosed in a thick shell that is covered with a pulpy husk.
The town of Nogales, on the Arizon-Mexico border, has taken it s name from the Spanish name for walnuts, nogal.
Because of the thick shell, very little meat is found in each nut, but what is there is quite tasty and very rich in fat-sometimes as much as 75 percent of the nut is oil.The soft husk surrounding the shell will stain the skin brown, so use gloves when husking walnuts. The hard nuts are best opened by banging them with a hammer, then using a nutpick or other shapr thin instrument to pick out the meats. The Apaches especially relished the black walnut, they ate it raw, and also used it in cooking and baking.