them when fresh out of the oven.

Brazil nuts are few and far between. We see them in the nut bins at the supermarket

during the holiday season, usually mixed with other unshelled nuts for your guests to crack with

that ornate nutcracker Aunt Mabel sent you as a wedding gift. You may find one or two token

Brazil nuts in the canned nut mixes, whose population is mostly low-class peanuts. Brazil nuts

are high-priced, so food packers count them out frugally.

Brazils are the only common nuts that stubbornly refuse cultivation. They are native to

the Amazonian rain forests and grow on enormous trees in a fascinating fashion. A coconut-like

hard shell holds 12 to 20 nuts, arranged like orange segments. When the nuts are mature, the

entire thing falls to the ground where workers collect them by hand only early mornings. Why in

the morning? Supposedly that is the least likely time they fall high up from the tree. Each shell

weighs between 2 and 4 pounds (1 to 2 kg) and can easily kill a gatherer if they make a direct hit

on top of the head. These nuts are expensive even with cheap labor because of hand harvesting.

Cashews still warm from toasting, have as incomparable a flavor as the best of nuts.

Fresh cashew nuts are excellent, but fresh ones are hard to find away from the growing areas.

The few cashews you find in a mixed nut can are anything but fresh.

Cashew trees are native to Central America, Mexico, South America and the West Indies

and they have also been successfully introduced into Asia and Africa. There are many varieties,

but none has been really tamed into providing us a fast-growing, uniform and consistent crop.

Harvesting is extremely labor intensive, even though each tree yields 200 pound (90 kg) of nuts a

year. The nut forms at the end of a highly-perishable fruit called the cashew apple. Originally

they harvested the cashew apple, which some people say is better tasting than the nut itself, and

they discarded the nut because of its very hard shell. Unfortunately, cashew apple is so

perishable that it cannot survive transportation outside the cashew harvest area—few of us had

the chance to taste it.

A thick, husk-like layer, called the cardol, surrounds the nut itself and a very tough shell

protects the kernel. That tough shell is only one of the major problems of harvesting. The other

problem is a caustic oil contained in the cardol layer as well as in the shell. It is an effective

protection against foraging animals and insects, but it also attacks the human harvester's skin.

Heat destroys some but not all of this caustic oil, and a good processing system still hasn't been

developed. The nut itself also contains some of the caustic oil, so you cannot eat cashews raw.

Because of processing problems and limited supplies, cashews are relatively expensive

though prices came down enough to compete with our lower-priced nuts.

Coconuts are a ubiquitous crop in the tropics. They are a true staple diet item for people

who live in tropical low-elevation areas where coconut palms flourish. Coconuts are everywhere

and are inexpensive. They use coconuts for everything, from sweets to alcoholic and non-

alcoholic beverages and in foods of every sorts. They use every part of not only the nut but the

tree for something. Coconuts are not nearly as popular in the North America, because they

deteriorate fast. It is not often you can bring one home from the supermarket that still has much

fresh coconut taste without a hint of rancidity or mold.

It is probably ocean currents that carried coconuts all over the world, so no one knows

where their original home was. According to botanists the coconut is not a nut kernel inside a

shell but a huge seed whose shell is lined with the white meat we know as coconut. The center of

a mature coconut is empty except for a small amount of liquid which is not very good to drink.

The coconut milk for cooking, that Asian recipes call for, is a liquid you make from the scraped

coconut meat, not the liquid in the coconut itself.

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