Image of cashew fruit by Bishnu Sarangi from Pixabay
by Dawn Smith-Pfeifer
I was today years old when I learned that walnuts and cashews are drupes. To be honest, I didn’t know what a drupe was either, so it was quite a learning day for me! An alternate name for a drupe is stone fruit, which I had heard of, I just didn’t realize it was a class of fruit, rather than one particular fruit.
I started down this nutty rabbit hole because of a conversation my coworker Amy and I were having about the digestibility of cashews and walnuts. She “googled” it and came back to my office saying, “They’re drupes.”
I picked up a pen and asked “Droop?” as I was writing it on my notepad.
“D-R-U-P-E,” she spelled.
“Drupe. I’ve never heard of that before!” I exclaimed incredulously. (How’s that for snappy dialogue!) “This is a great topic for On Your Table!” I said excitedly and jotted down, “Are you nuts?” above Droop Drupe.
Photographic evidence of my nutty thought process!
And, with the title decided, I did a bit of my own “googling.”
You know what I learned? That I’m going keep calling drupes, legumes, and actual nuts “nuts” because anything else is WAAAY too confusing. And get this, there are culinary nuts and botanical nuts.
This is an actual quote from Wikipedia, “Some common ‘culinary nuts’: hazelnuts, which are also botanical nuts; Brazil nuts, which are not botanical nuts, but rather the seeds of a capsule; and walnuts, pecans, and almonds (which are not botanical nuts, but rather the seeds of drupes).”
Say what? And don’t even get me started on peanuts, which are not nuts, but legumes. THAT one I knew already. But I did not know that legumes are one of the largest plant families in the world, with upwards of 18,000 species, including chickpeas and lentils.
But is a peanut a culinary nut? According to Wikipedia, yes, because culinary nuts are divided into four categories: botanical nuts, drupes, gymnosperm seeds, and angiosperm seeds. And peanuts are angiosperm seeds.
And after all this information, do I really know if walnuts and cashews are harder to digest than nuts and legumes? Nope. But I feel so educated about nuts now, I don’t even care!
Smith-Pfeifer is the NDFB Director of Content and Communications and edits On Your Table, and sometimes writes silly posts for it, like this one!