List of Culinary Nuts

List Of Culinary Nuts

Culinary nuts are dry, edible fruits or seeds, usually, but not always, with a high fat content. Nuts are used in a wide variety of edible roles, including in baking, as snacks (either roasted or raw), and as flavoring. In addition to botanical nuts, fruits and seeds that have a similar appearance and culinary role are also considered to be culinary nuts. Nearly all culinary nuts are from fruit or seeds in one of four categories:

• True, or botanical nuts: dry, hard-shelled, uncompartmented fruit that do not split on maturity to release seeds;
• Drupes: fleshy fruit surrounding a stone, or pit, containing a seed (e.g. almonds);

• Gymnosperm seeds: naked seeds, with no enclosure (e.g. pine nuts);
• Angiosperm seeds: unenclosed seeds within a larger fruit (e.g. peanuts).

Nuts have a rich history as food. For many Native American nations, a wide variety of nuts, including acorns, American beech and others, served as a major source of starch and fat, over thousands of years. Similarly, a wide variety of nuts have served as forage food for Australian aboriginal people for many centuries. Other culinary nuts, though known from ancient times, have seen dramatic increases in use in modern times. The most striking such example is the peanut. Its usage was popularized by the work of George Washington Carver, who discovered and popularized many applications of the peanut after employing peanut plants for soil amelioration in fields used to grow cotton.