|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Those Magnificent Macadamias
| Article
# : |
20205 |
|
|
Section : |
LIFE
|
| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1992 |
1,459 Words |
| Author
: |
Adrianne Marcus
Adrianne Marcus has published in Food & Wine, Menus, Travel &
Leisure, Good Food, Cooking Light, and other magazines. |
You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too many macadamia nuts. Five pounds in the shell becomes one pound (about 3 1/2 cups) of kernels, and that translates to very few minutes of party noshing. Picky people may peruse the peanuts, filch a few filberts, but no one leaves the macadamias untouched. That's because these pale golden morsels, with their subtle buttery taste, are the caviar of nuts. Quick. A refill.
But macadamias didn't start out being rich and famous. They weren't even called macadamias until 1857. Called Queensland nut, bush nut, bopple or bauple nut, and Australian nut; they had all sorts of names. Two men gave the name we know them by now: Walter Hill, first director of the Brisbane Botanical Gardens, and Ferdinand von Mueller. They were on a botanical expedition to Queensland's Pine River district, north of Brisbane, when they came upon the trees. They renamed them after Dr. John Macadam, Secretary of the Philosophical Society of Victoria. Macadam was also a scientist in analytical chemistry in Australia.
Australia is the botanical home of the macadamia, where six of the ten species of the Protaecae family are native. Only two of the ten species produce edible nuts, and even with these, Australians were hardly overwhelmed. Talk about a difficult nut to crack! Since you could run a truck over the shells and no break them, it's no wonder that few people had tasted their succulence. As macadamia nuts are one of the hardest shelled nuts in the world, it requires three hundred pounds per square inch of pressure to crack them, or a good strong hammer and a heavy hand.
It took a long sea voyage and transplantation to another land to make the lush macadamia nut known. In 1881, just twenty-four years after the macadamia's formal botanical identification, Hawaii became its adopted home. The macadamia wasn't really taken to Hawaii as a nut tree, at least not in the eyes of William H. Purvis, the man who carried the burlap bag containing the first trees down the gangplank. Purvis liked the way the trees looked and thought that sixty-foot (eventually) trees with hollylike; shiny evergreen leaves would make nice ornamental plantings for his home. Plus, they would function as windbreaks. The nuts were almost an afterthought.
Van's Macadamia Nuts
In 1916, when a sickly young man, Ernest Van Tassel, arrived in Hawaii from the United States, the trees were bearing enough nuts that Van Tassel got a taste of them during a
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
