Still life: Black Walnuts on Oak Table
Nut Cracking
It’s black walnut time in the Ozarks. Nature makes you work for every bit of nut meat you claw from those shells. The old saying: “It’s a tough nut to crack” must’ve come from old-timers struggling to get to the inside of a black walnut.
Black walnuts look like variegated golf balls lying in the rough. Picking them up is just the beginning of the work it takes to reach the tightly enclosed nut.
This time of year, it’s not unusual to see green-shelled walnuts lining a driveway so cars can run over them for a week, or more, to break the hard outer shell. The remains are left to dry before the inner hull is cracked to retrieve the nut.
Cracking walnuts requires gloves to keep your fingers from turning the same color as your favorite walnut table. The stain will eventually wear off, but it’s impossible to remove from clothing.
This is what gloves look like after gathering black walnuts. Plastic gloves are better.
Do Black Walnuts Differ from Their English Cousins?
Indeed, they do. Black walnuts grow wild, while the English variety is grown in orchards and have a much milder flavor. The wild ones have a thicker shell. The nut comes out only in pieces and has a bold, earthy taste.
If you want to gather and crack your own black walnuts, here’s a good pictorial.
With 70% of production worldwide, Missouri is considered the #1 producer of black walnuts.
Inside the ugly layers is the beautiful meat of the black walnut, that needs to be extracted with a nut pick.
Walnuts make for a great centerpiece as well as a baking ingredient.
A quick look and I thought these were ripening figs. I’ll bet these Missouri walnuts are just as delicious. We have walnut trees at the barn but I need to take a closer look to see if they’re black walnuts or the English variety. I’m betting on black walnuts and i’ll see if I can get the horses’ hooves to crack them for me.
When I was a child in Jefferson County, my family would gather them to make buttered, black walnut ice cream. Delicious. We made homemade ice cream multiple times a year. This was our winter ice cream for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Black walnut ice cream sounds divine. I would never have thought of it. Thanks, Amanda. What a fitting seasonal ice cream for the holidays.