WHAT is a nut? As definitions go, this is a surprisingly hard nut to crack. Botanically, a nut is a dry fruit that consists of a hard shell covering a seed. True nuts tantalisingly available in a British wood or hedge near you include beech, sweet chestnuts and hazelnuts. This leaves the walnut, brought here by the Romans to confuse matters (as well as improve our cuisine). Despite its nomenclature, a walnut has characteristics of a drupe, a fruit that is fleshy on the outside with an interior shell over seed, as well as a nut. Hence our friends across the Channel picking green walnuts for pickled treats.
If the popular usage of ‘nut’ is incompatible with botanical exactitude, humans and animals have long agreed it would be nuts to overlook true nuts (and that globular, wrinkly bundle of imprecision, the walnut) in the diet. There’s the rub. Getting to the nuts before the squirrels, the wood mice, voles, badgers,, translates loosely as ‘chattering acorn gatherer’.
