I was standing on the banks of the Ohio River near Louisville during a reporting trip when I heard a thwop—something hard had fallen from above and hit the packed dirt of the bluff. I looked down as a plump peridot orb rolled toward my tennis shoes, and out of something like habit, I picked it up. When I was a child, we called these billiard ball–sized black walnuts “green gold.”
Eastern black walnut trees grow around most of the South, and when I wander, I often spot them on sunny hillsides or along water. People in the region have long valued the native tree, first as foodstuff and later for its lumber. Even now, woodworkers prize walnut for its strength and beauty, turning it into gunstocks, turkey calls, and furniture.
Folklore says that nothing will grow around a black walnut, and to some degree that’s true. Scientists use the term allelopathic: The tree excretes a chemical called juglone into the soil that can harm any nearby competition for resources. I didn’t have the language for such phenomena as a nine-year-old, but I learned little facts like that while foraging with Dad and Grandma Mary in the forests of South Carolina’s Spartanburg and Newberry Counties. Back then I couldn’t tell the difference between wild carrots (a.k.a. Queen Anne’s lace) and a potentially deadly look-alike, poison hemlock. But black walnuts were easy for me to spot, and in foraging, as in other great romances, you never forget your first.
My family also couldn’t get enough of them. We were nuts for foraged nuts, period—pecans, hickories, chestnuts. And while we didn’t have any black walnuts on our property, in a good year, a bountiful tree can produce up to fifteen thousand nuts. Folks we knew would literally give the things away, if we came and harvested them ourselves.
Not the types to turn down free food, my family could often be found on a late-summer or autumn afternoon rattling up someone’s dirt road with a clutch of five-gallon buckets in the truck bed. Any child within shouting distance was told to join the crew. Sometimes the adults offered to pay us (usually a dollar or so per bucket) or promised a homemade baked treat, like banana bread. Other times we were simply told what we were going to do, and I spent many an afternoon bent over in thickets or shin-high grass searching for black walnuts.
When we ran Graham’s Produce, our family’s farm stand, we always had shelled walnuts on hand. We took all of the work out of the enterprise, and people were willing to pay to avoid that labor. And it was labor—one with an art to it. I had to hit the tough hull hard enough to crack it but not so hard as to shatter the delicate meat inside, a precise action made even more difficult by the leather gloves I wore to prevent the juglone from staining my hands.
When I shelled alone, I hated the task. The pungent smell of the nut oil combined with that of leather, hot from the friction, assaulted my nose. But it was the best when we did it as a family. Whether it was at home around the kitchen table or at the produce stand in metal folding chairs, we told stories while tapping walnuts to pass the time. At the latter, as the kerosene heater hissed and ticked to heat the small concrete block building, I learned more about my dad’s childhood adventures, like the times he and my uncle Charles pretended to be cowboys roaming my grandfather’s fields instead of tending to the mules.
Some evenings I ate far more than I bagged to sell, one of the rare instances when nobody fussed at me for snacking on the wares. The nuts didn’t cost much money, just time. And that’s one of the big drawbacks of black walnuts. Before shelling, they need weeks to dry out, or “cure,” so the nutmeat can separate from its shell. It could take a month or longer before any of us could get cracking. Due to the effort required, we wasted nothing.
Even the hulls had their uses. Grandma Mary always saved the discarded shells, and when she accumulated enough, she would place them in a pot of water, where they would release their stain. When white clothing no longer looked pristine, we soaked the pieces in the walnut dye, turning the fabrics a tint that could range from old brass to raw sienna to russet to chocolate brown. I didn’t care what color it came out—I was just glad to be doing something with Grandma. But the edible results of our toiling were my favorite.
The black walnut…well, there’s character to it. Some people have an aversion to its aroma, likening it to sweaty feet. I instead find the musk earthy and intense, with hints of the deep green scent associated with moss. What never fails to stun me, though, is the taste. The first bite of nut-meat is always a little bracing—the flavor both sweet and astringent with tannins. If cured right, the nut will release just a hint of satisfying bitterness on the back end. Its boldness means it works well in heartier cakes and sweets.
It’s been decades since I had a piece of Grandma’s black walnut fudge, the smooth, creamy treat that would taste too sweet for me now. These days I’d rather have black walnut ice cream. Or a piece of Grandma Mary’s apple spice cake. Black walnuts shone in the cake because the fat in them rounded out or enhanced the recipe’s robust spices and other ingredients, such as the subtle heat they elicited from the ginger or the sweet but tart smack of the apples they amplified. The cake may not have looked pretty—more like a big block of brown, which Grandma occasionally covered in cream cheese icing—but damn, it was delicious.
Last year, while in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, for a writer’s residency, the Kentucky author and poet Crystal Wilkinson and I made our way at least once a week to Frozen Gold Ice Cream for a late-night cone, all the while chatting about our upbringings. Every time we went, I considered other flavors but, in the end, came back to the one that can be hard to find: black walnut. She did too. Raised rural and a generation older than me, she was one of the few folks around who understood my family’s penchant for country cure-alls like castor oil, turpentine, and Epsom salts. Black walnuts bonded us.
Then I had an epiphany: Just as black walnuts are tough nuts to crack, my family members and I are too. Our harder-than-average exteriors mean it takes time to get to know us. But I like to think we are also worth the work.
On that hot afternoon along the river near Louisville, I resisted the urge to pry open the fruit that had fallen to my feet. I picked up a couple more and rolled them around in my hand before pocketing them. Nostalgic for the taste, I searched everywhere on that road trip for cured ones. No stores, no produce stands, no specialty shops carried them. When I reached Missouri, where the Eastern black walnut is the state tree nut, I walked up and down the aisles of local grocery stores, looking. I finally located some across the state line, in Kansas.
My adoration for my favorite childhood nut has since been rekindled. I add some into my weekly granola. I swap out the English walnuts in my regular beet salad for the more regional staple. I am dreaming up a black walnut pesto. And when the winds get a little cooler and more black walnuts begin to drop, I know I’ll make Grandma’s cake.
Latria Graham is a Garden & Gun contributing editor from Spartanburg, South Carolina, and writes the magazine’s This Land column, which documents aspects of the natural world in the South. An assistant professor of creative writing at Augusta University and an instructor for the University of Georgia’s Narrative Nonfiction MFA program, Graham shares her adventures on Instagram (@mslatriagraham) and her work at LatriaGraham.com.
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