| These are great fun to eat.
I have it down to a fine art. I can split that shell open with the tiniest
bit of pressure in the right spot and then I've got four quarters to 'forrage'
from the shell. These make great beak grinders too, though nothing beats
the Almond shell on that. Unfortunately, they only ever seem to appear
in their shells on the supermarket shelves near Christmas. If daddy had
half a brain, he'd stock up with them then for me for the year, but does
he?
The best-known member of
the genus is the Persian walnut (J. regia, literally "royal walnut"), native
from the Balkans in southeast Europe, southwest & central Asia to the
Himalaya and southwest China. Walnuts are a traditional feature of Iranian
cuisine; the nation has extensive orchards which are an important feature
of regional economies. In Kyrgyzstan alone there are 230,700 ha of walnut-fruit
forest, where J. regia is the dominant overstory tree (Hemery and Popov
1998). In non-European English-speaking nations, the nut of the J. regia
is often called the "English walnut"; in Great Britain, the "common walnut." |
