SC - cognac

[Uduido@aol.com]

My current favorite book, The Fruits, Herbes, and Vegetables of Italy
(1614) has this to say about Walnuts and Walnut Oil:

We also have walnust, which are common everywhere.  The green ones start
to be good about the feast of St Lawrence [10 August], and are highly
esteemed and eaten by the gentry, who consider the dried ones to be
rather coarse and unrefined.

Dried walnuts are used in a garlic sauce called agliata, and this is how
you make it: first take the best and whitest walnut kernels, in the
quantity you need, and pound them in a really clean stone mortar (not a
metal one) in which you have first crushed two or three cloves of
garlic.  When they are all well mixed, take three slices of stale white
bread, well soaked in a good meat broth which is not too fatty, and
pound them with the nuts.  When everything is well mixed, thin the sauce
out with some of the same warm meat broth, until you have a liquid like
the pap they give to little babies.  Serve it tepid, with a little
crushed pepper.

Prudent folk eat this sauce with fresh pork as an antidote to its
harmful qualities, or with boiled goose, an equally indigestible food. 
Serious pasta eaters even enjoy agliata with macaroni and lasagne.  It
is also good with boletus mushrooms, which I shall describe in due
course.

In Lombardy they make oil from the poorer quality nuts, which they use
to light the stables.  Poor people and evern worthy artisans use it in
lamps about the house or on the table.  The peasants in the countryside
use nothing else in their lamps.  This oil is good for various ailments.
 it also makes furniture made out of walnut wood--bedstads, tables,
benches, and so forth -- shine like a mirror.

toodles, margaret