The piñon tree is a native to New Mexico and I have many fond memories of my extended family going into the woods to gather the nuts. The piñon tree is a pine tree (Pinus edulis) that only grows in the southwestern region of the US. It never gets very big and is the state tree of New Mexico.
To gather the nuts – which don’t appear in abundance every year – my family would take a couple of bed sheets and spread them underneath the target tree. My youngest uncle was usually chosen to climb the tree and shake the branches. The cones or the nuts from therein would fall onto the sheets. When a sufficient harvest was accumulated, the crop would be taken home to be roasted (after extracting the nuts from the cones, of course). There is a learned technique of putting the roasted nut in your mouth, splitting the shell with your teeth and extracting the edible morsel with your tongue that is impossible to describe. It can be efficient enough that you actually gain more energy than you expend.
Several different species of pine trees produce eatable nuts, but – among the cognoscenti - the piñon is the best. If you look at the label on “pine nuts” that you can buy in the grocery store, you’ll find that they come from China – which is OK. They’re tasty and will suffice – but they are not piñons. In fact, there are federal laws which only allow a label of “piñon nuts” to be used only if the fruit is from Pinus edulis. Not surprising, this law was promoted by legislators from the southwest.
Each year I order a few pounds from New Mexico to be nibbled on through the winter months while sitting in from of a wood fire. I find a “Chenin Blanc” goes very well with them.
© 2014 Lester C. Welch
My father's favorite Christmas gift each year was a bag of pine nuts with shells. I can still remember him in his big chair with a bowl of nuts, after dinner, cracking them with his teeth.
ReplyDelete