FOOD SPECIAL ................. A Tale of Two Nuts

A Tale of Two Nuts  Cashews prevent soil erosion, since the trees grow on seashore lands where they help knit the soil together. They also require little maintenance and are valued for their medicinal properties Cashew and Brazil nut both originated in the South American country. However, while one spread across the globe, the other continues to remain a domestic produce Most people who have seen Charley's Aunt -and ever since it was first produced 122 years back a very great many people have seen or acted in this classic British farce -will remember that the titular aunt is impersonated by a man dressed as a woman. But the actual aunt also ap pears, and she i s Dona Luc ia d'Alvadorez, a rich widow from Brazil “where the nuts come from“. Brazil today, and particularly in the next few World Cup weeks, is identified mostly with soccer, samba and social protests. Charley's Aunt is a reminder that in the late Victorian period it had a rather different reputation as a mysteri ous place where people could go to make somewhat dubious fortunes from commodities like rubber, coffee or maybe even nuts. In the play this meant Brazil nuts, the very large, rich tasting nuts that were the one food item directly identified with the country. Brazil nuts don't only come from Brazil -Bolivia is a larger exporter -but they do only come from the rain forest region that takes up the mass of Brazil. At a time when nuts and port wine were a regular end to formal din ners, Brazil nuts, standing out by their size from the walnuts, almonds and oth er nuts, were the one branded Brazilian item most people knew. Even in Victori an Bombay Treacher & Co advertised Brazil nuts at eight annas a pound in The Times of India. Bean-shaped Nut But what is often forgotten is that there is another nut from Brazil which is much more consumed even if less identified with the country. Cashews originated in Brazil's northeast, the easternmost corner of South America. It is a place known for its excellent food thanks to the abundance of local produce and the use it was put to by the native tribes, the Portuguese colonizers and African slaves they brought in. André Thévet, a French priest described the cashew in 1558 when he noted acquisitively that the land was “too good to belong to the cannibals as it bears fruit in abundance and roots and vegetables together with great quantities of the trees called `acajous'.“ He was struck, as everyone is, by the weird fruit: “shaped like a goose-egg“ from the base of which “hangs a sort of nut, as big as a chestnut and with the shape of a kidney. As to the kernel therein, it is excellent to eat when lightly cooked.“ This cooking refers to what the “canni bals“ knew, which was that the nut has a shell full of a burning liquid which can be neutralized by heat so that the edible part can be extracted. But later travellers disdained learning from the locals and just focussed on the fruit (actually a swollen fruit stem) called the cashew apple. In SP Malhotra's heavyweight book World Edible Nuts Economy, he notes that the nut was actually discarded in favour of the other parts: “Natives also knew of many medicinal uses for the apple juice, bark and caustic seed oil that were later exploited by the Europeans.“ Riding with the Colonials What is really remarkable is how fast cashew spread from Brazil across the world. Native tribes may already have taken it to the Caribbean, but it was the Portuguese who took it to their colonies across the world like Mozambique and Goa (the Spanish may have taken it across the Pacific to the Philippines). It grew well and by 1596 when Dutch traveller Jan Huyghen van Linschoten published his account of Goa, where he lived for some years, collecting stories from sailors about the further East Indies, he could write that cashews “are in likewise in great numbers all over India“. Cashew is Anacardium occidentale and belongs to a family known around the world for producing skin-irritating chemicals. The mango is one (which is why some people are allergic to it) and so is another Indian cousin, the bhilma (Semecarpus anacardium) which bears a fruit that looks a bit like the cashew. Its sap was used by sepoys when they wanted to skip work by pretending they had a skin disease and like many strong plant chemicals it is used in ayurveda. Bhilma is what the Portuguese botanist Garcia de Orta was probably referring to when he wrote about `anacardo' in 1863. Some of the Indian trees that Linschoten refers to may have been bhilma, but his description of cashew nuts is accurate: “a white kernel very pleasant to eat like Pistaccios...the Nuts are used in bankets, being eaten with wine and without wine, because of their good taste.“ Somehow in 40 years this Brazilian plant had established a strong foothold across the world. Cashews are eaten as snacks, made into paste for curries or ground with sugar for kaju katlis and many other Indian sweets. The Chinese put them in stir-fries. Malhotra writes that the Mozambique census asks families how many cashew trees they own. Crafty Cashew Brazil nuts, by contrast, are rare and expensive. In India they sell for `2,000 a kg. They are boosted by nutritionists as the best natural source for selenium, a trace mineral our body needs and for which some claim major benefits. Yet they are hardly grown outside Brazil and even there they are still mostly collected from wild or semi-wild trees, whose numbers are getting affected by deforestation. One Brazilian nut has become one of the most consumed in the world, the other is one of the least. The reason for this is the different strategies the two trees have taken to reproduction. Michael Pollan, an American professor and activist, coined the phrase “botany of desire“ to argue that just as people manipulate plants, plants manipulate people: “Did I choose to plant these potatoes or did the potato make me do it? In fact, both statements are true. I can even remember the exact moment the spud seduced me, showing off its knobbly charms in the pages of a seed catalogue. I think it was the tasty-sounding `butteryyellow flesh' that did it.“ If plants make themselves desirable so that people spread them then cashew is a total slut. It seduced the Portuguese into spreading it by reasons that were both serious and rather less. The weird looking fruit, for example, is reason enough for botanists to grow it as a curiosity. A more serious reason is that cashews prevent soil erosion, since the trees grow on seashore lands where they help knit the soil together. The fact that they require little maintenance makes them an easy date. Drops of Elixir Medical reasons were important at a time when nearly all cures came from plants. Cashew shell liquid was caustic, but doctors could use its power for good, as an antimicrobial agent or to burn out larval infections. An even more enjoyable form of `medicine' is the alcohol that almost every country that grows cashews has distilled from the cashew apple: Goan feni, Brazilian acayú or East African konyagi (now made from other sources, but originally from cashew apple). Cashew apple has an odd, astringent taste and spoils very fast, which is why the best way to use it is to allow it to finish fer menting and then refine the result. The Times of India on November 5, 1902, carried a letter from an unnamed reader in Mazagaon (where many Goans lived) decrying the ban on import of Goan feni. It was, said the writer, “an excellent medicine in case of rheumatism“ which people should be allowed to import, after paying duty. And quite apart from all these reasons, there is that nut. Brazil nut trees, Bertho letia excelsa, are the lofty opposite. They have no close relatives, though a distant one is the cannonball tree, known as nagalinga or nagkeshar in India for its snake like flowers. Where the cashew grows close to the ground (making harvesting easier), the Brazil nut tree soars so high above other trees that the only way to harvest the nuts is to wait for their hard, cannonball like container in which they form to drop by itself, with lethal results if harvesters are not careful. The containers are so hard that in the wild only rodents called agoutis have teeth strong enough to bite through. They eat some nuts and bury the rest, and those they forget about are what might grow into new trees. The trees also need special bees to pollinate them, which in turn depend on other plants around them for complete sustenance. When loggers try to pre serve Brazil nut trees, but cut the others around them, their pollination suffers since the bees vanish. Riskier Option It took botanists a while to figure all this out which is why Brazil nuts were never grown in plantations. Even today, this rarely happens, for a simple reason -Brazil nut trees take 12-15 years before they first produce nuts, and only really start producing at 30. They then live for a couple of centuries, but it needs serious long-term planning to grow them on a commercial scale. In every way their slow, niche, luxury strategy is the opposite of cashews' energetic, mass-market, crowd-pleasing approach. Which works better is not really the point. The Brazil nut strategy is riskier, since it allows for few buffers if things go wrong, as with deforestation they might. Yet people who want them will spend a lot for them, certainly much more than cashews can command -but as they proliferate, perhaps they don't care. Either way, both nuts offer an excellent accompaniment to World Cup action, giving you something to chew on as you watch the drama unfold in the place they come from.

Vikram Doctor

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