Nut

Botanically, a dry, single-seeded, hard-shelled fruit that has to be cracked open. "Nut" also refers to any seed or fruit with an edible kernel in a hard or brittle shell, such as almonds, walnuts and coconuts. Since the earliest times, nuts have been used as a source of food and oil. They were collected by food-gathering peoples before the birth of agriculture, used extensively by the Greeks, and cultivated by the Romans. There's evidence that, as early as the 2nd century BC, the Romans distributed sugared almonds on such occasions as birthdays and weddings. Nuts are also an important feature of Middle Eastern cookery. In fact, medieval Europe learned to use nuts in cooking from the Arabs, who used them not only in sauces with meat and poultry but also in marzipan, nougat and other sweetmeats. Spain, occupied for almost eight centuries by the Moors, also adopted the use of nuts in cooking and took the technique to the Americas, but the Spanish found the Aztecs already using pumpkin seeds, peanuts and probably pecans as thickeners for poultry, fish and shellfish sauces. Almonds are used extensively in Scandinavian cooking - it's said that whoever finds the almonds in the Swedish Christmas Eve rice pudding will be the next to marry. Almonds are also important in Indonesian, Far Eastern and African cooking. Cashews are the only nuts never sold in the shell because of the toxic oil in its shell.

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