Young coconuts, however, are different. A very refreshing, nourishing, slightly fizzy,

sweet coconut water fills them, that tropical populations drank regularly until the U.S. beverage

makers introduced soft drinks. Now they have a definite preference for the imported beverages.

Unlike other nuts, you eat coconut raw without cooking or roasting. When fresh, its

flavor is excellent, but it is particularly high in saturated oil. The most common use for coconut

is in grated form, either sweetened or unsweetened, for baking or in cooking. Southeast Asian

curries use coconut milk, which you can make yourself from flakes or fresh coconut (if you can

get fresh ones). Coconut milk is also available canned, frozen or dehydrated. Most Asian food

markets carry a staggering variety of other coconut products, too.

Seeds are similar to nuts in both nutrition and composition. In our cuisine we only use

seeds in small quantities, except by vegetarian and health food nuts. The major distinction

between nuts and seeds is size. If it is tiny, we call it a seed, if larger, nut is a more appropriate

term (even though the coconut is a seed). There's another distinction, though. Nuts grow on trees

while seeds grow on small annual plants.

We use four kinds of seeds regularly in cooking—poppy, sesame, sunflower and

pumpkin seeds. We don't use poppy seeds much in baking, except sprinkled over rolls or bread

before they are popped in the oven. It is too bad because they have a unique and delightful flavor

in dessert preparations. In many Central European desserts poppy seeds are a feature ingredient.

Cooks never toast poppy seeds. Sesame seeds appear on home pantry shelves more and more

often now that Asian cooking is so popular. They are very good raw but improve much on

roasting.

We eat pumpkin and sunflower seeds mainly in snack foods, but more and more cooks

toast them and add to salads for both flavor and texture.

Chestnuts don't follow nut rules. They are low in oil and high in starch, resembling

wheat grain in their composition more than nuts. You can use them as a starchy vegetable in

cooked preparations like turkey stuffing, yet they are true nuts. Very few American cooks are

familiar with the potential that chestnuts offer. In the Mediterranean they are cherished, in

particular in France, where they use chestnuts as vegetables, in soups and in sumptuous puréed

dessert preparations that are in a class of their own. Italians are also fond of chestnuts, but more

in its plain roasted form. Several parts of Southeast Asian cuisine use chestnuts, too.

Tedious, time-consuming preparation may be the main reason for chestnut’s poor

reception in the America. Prepared canned chestnuts are available, but they don’t resemble fresh

chestnuts at all. Fresh ones, on the other hand, are not always easy to find, and it is a very short

time span when they are in season.

The chestnut tree is a distant relative of the oak, and is native to Southern Europe, Asia

and North America. The mature trees are large and each one yields anywhere from 100 to 300

pounds (45 to 140 kg) of nuts in late autumn.

A great many native chestnut trees once grew in eastern North America, but a tree blight

disease in the early 1900s wiped nearly all of them out. Now they are beginning to reappear in

various parts of the country, especially where Asian population has settled, and fresh chestnuts

are once again available from mid-October through December.

Freshly picked chestnuts are actually too high in starch and need to rest for a few days to

give the starch time to convert to sugar. But this curing period must be short or they lose their

moisture and dry out. Because of their high starch content, chestnuts are not edible raw—eating

raw chestnuts is almost like eating raw potatoes, though they do have a mild, pleasant flavor and

crunch while raw potatoes have none. But there is a drastic change when you cook or roast them,

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