[Sca-cooks] shelling walnut help

Stefan li Rous StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
Fri Nov 6 15:17:29 PST 2009


Morgana asked:
<<< I'm about to acquire grocery bags of both English and black  
walnuts.  I know we've discussed best ways to shell them, but I don't  
remember what those were.>>>

 From the nuts-msg file in the FOOD section of the Florilegium:

---
Date: Sun, 17 Jan 1999 18:50:40 EST
From: LrdRas at aol.com
Subject: Re: SC - New pet peeve

melc2newton at juno.com writes:
<< first course board - walnuts . . . in their shells. Without nut
  crackers.(new peeve) Maybe these manly fighter types can crack walnuts
  with their bare hands, but I can't. >>

Simply place the point of your knife firmly in the large end of the  
walnut
and twist. Voila! The nut seperates easily and cleanly into two halves  
without
any effort. :-)

Ras
---
Date: Sun, 26 Oct 2003 09:13:25 -0500
From: johnna holloway <johnna at sitka.engin.umich.edu>
Subject: Re: [Sca-cooks] Walnuts and nut cracking devices
To: Cooks within the SCA <sca-cooks at ansteorra.org>

I have read that people leave them in their driveways and drive over
them to loosen the husks. I can remember as a child sitting on the
concrete cistern platform (top of the cistern) at my grandparent's and
cracking them using hammers and screws and other assorted hardware that
was there. It was always a chore and they stained the hands and clothing
just from that activity. My books on rural life that might have a
picture are packed. I wonder of they were milled or run between grinding
stones in some fashion, but that is a guess.

Johnnae llyn Lewis
----

This message might also be of interest:

---
Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2001 17:22:34 -0600
From: "Robbin Long" <rlong at srrc.ars.usda.gov>
Subject: Freezing nuts, was Re: SC - Re: losenges fryes/potageof beans  
boiled

 >It helps if you freeze anything like flour/dried legumes, box mixes  
etc.
 >to 0 degrees fahrenheit for 3 days, it kills the eggs that are extant
 >that survived the milling process. I have also gotten them in bags of
 >chopped nuts [IIRC walnuts]
 >margali

As an addendum:  freezing walnuts will also help prevent the  
accumulation of mycotoxic fungus.  It is not common, but walnuts, even  
commercially grown, are subject to fungal infection, and storing them  
frozen will help keep it from increasing if you happen to get a bad  
batch.

That this still happens was something I discovered quite graphically  
when I came down with mycotoxicosis not once, but twice.  I made  
Thanksgiving stuffing with walnuts and came down with some very  
strange tremorgenic symptoms that sent me to the emergency room.  They  
thought I was having a panic attack (which I have NEVER had), and I  
didn't make the connection until I used the same batch to make a  
walnut-ricotta pasta sauce (very tasty) and banana bread several weeks  
later, and got the same symptoms times two (my lord did, too, but he  
is twice my weight, he didn't eat as much, and he got it far milder).   
It was pretty frightening.

Just goes to show the medical professionals don't know everything...

Broinnfhionn
---

Since it appears you might end up with quite a number of walnuts, you  
might also want to look at the various recipes in this same file to  
preserve or use up the walnuts.

Stefan
--------
THLord Stefan li Rous    Barony of Bryn Gwlad    Kingdom of Ansteorra
    Mark S. Harris           Austin, Texas          StefanliRous at austin.rr.com
**** See Stefan's Florilegium files at:  http://www.florilegium.org ****





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