I don't write about religion, politics or sports, so my readers don't often send me e-mails expressing their personal passions and views. A column on garlic, for example, did not elicit a flood of fanatical fervor, although in my own estimation garlic ranks right after God and country and well ahead of the Pittsburgh Steelers.
So I didn't expect the surge of electronic enthusiasm I received from readers of my recent column on -- of all things -- walnuts.
Readers' communications ranged from nostalgic reminiscences of their chock-full-of-nuts childhoods to resourceful, if at times harrowing, techniques for cracking the most resistant of shells. Some of these missives were so interesting and instructive that I asked permission to print edited excerpts. They appear below, interspersed with comments of my own. After all, it would be unethical for a columnist to have his readers write his entire column for him.
But first, let's bear in mind the distinction between the familiar, brown-shelled English walnuts (Juglans regia) that grace our holiday tables and the black walnuts (J. nigra), whose shells are so thick and sturdy that they are not a common article of commerce, but whose trees are grown for their valuable wood.
Charles Leik of Great Falls writes:
"I have been involved with black walnuts my entire life, as was my father (born 1905) before me. Most of our efforts have been in growing walnut timber in Michigan. I planted trees from nuts in 1968 that even in our short growing season are now 40 feet high with 16-inch trunks, which we pruned to 18-inch lengths for veneer logs. There are probably 50 of these trees in our Michigan farmyard."
A personal note, if I may intrude on my own column: At about the same time in the 1960s, I had a couple of acres of back yard when I read in a magazine that mature black walnut trees could fetch as much as $10,000 apiece for their lumber. I was determined to turn my back yard into a Pennsylvania walnut and bask in luxury throughout my retirement years. Unfortunately, that was just one of my many unimplemented million-dollar ideas. (Another was to grow shallots, then a "gourmet" item championed by Julia Child but largely unavailable in this country.)
Leik continues:
"It was a winter Sunday afternoon ritual in our family to spread newspapers on the kitchen table and bring a pan of cracked (on the concrete basement floor) walnuts for picking. We ate the small pieces and saved the larger ones for Mother's baking. I suppose we learned patience from this experience."
Leik notes that even now he has a carton of black walnut ice cream in the house. Lucky Leik, I call him.
John H. Enders of Bethesda writes of similar youthful black walnut exploits:
"On our family farm near Sidney, Ohio, in the 1930s, an annual fall ritual was the gathering of black walnuts as they fell from the trees. We would put them, still in their green husks, in wooden-slatted potato crates to dry for a spell, then spread them, husks and all, on the gravel driveway and run over them with our car or tractor, effectively hulling them with minimum staining of hands and clothes. The shells were so robust that even the tractor wouldn't crack them.
"My father, mother, older sisters and I spent many a winter evening in our living room beside the wood heating stove, each with a flat iron held upside-down between our knees as an anvil and cracking the hard shells with a hammer. The price was only time and a few bruised fingers from poorly aimed hammer blows. But with no TV to distract us in those days, we spent time together as a family, actually TALKING to one another."
Cheron Rhodes of Springfield reports that her friend in Portland, Ore., cracks her backyard black walnuts with a drill press. I assume there isn't an actual drill bit in the machine and that it isn't turned on, but lowering the head down gradually onto the nut strikes me as a fine, nonviolent cracking method.
