Nutcracker Sweet

A plethora of walnuts have come my way. I’m a nut lover, a lover of nuts but I do not freely share this love with all nuts. I have my pride and I also have a very small nutcracker …… smirking doesn’t suit you. Brazil has much to recommend it save for its nuts. Brazil nuts are the Sirens of the nut world that will seductively lure the nut eating ingenue into believing that their creamy interior is freely and easily available when in reality, unlike the g-stringed jolies fesses of Copacabana, they are concealed and contained by an impenetrable chastity shell. The aphorism of “being between a rock and a hard place” originated as “put it between a rock and a hard place” and the “it” was the Brazil nut. The nuts that give me the most pleasure are those that shed their coverings with some small show of resistance. Filberts, hazelnuts, almonds, walnuts, macadamias, pecans, chestnuts and pistachios are the gigolos of the fruit and nut bowl while la volupté is provided by meltingly succulent dried fruits, plump raisins, translucent grapes and thththe soft

and the soft scarlet flesh of fresh figs; getting down and dirty with fruit and nuts is indeed fessetive(sic).

The apogee of this sensual nuttiness is to be found in a wonderful walnut tart that is to be found in “Under the Sun”, a corker of a book about food in the South of France by Caroline Conran. The recipe below is taken directly from the book, save for my pencil conversions from cups to grams. I hope that neither Caroline nor the publisher will be offended by my cavalier use of their property. The photograph of the the tart is my own as the home economy