Wet Behind The Ears On Walnuts

I had heard my mother-in-law speak fondly of wet walnuts and I thought I knew what she meant. I imagined that these were walnuts before their shells have hardened, harvested at that stage for pickling. We all love pickled walnuts. I was wrong. Wet walnuts are freshly harvested, fully-formed nuts picked during a short three week season in autumn. The nuts one buys at Christmas have been dried.  

I went to the Dedham Vale Vineyard Walnut and Wine Festival in the Stour Valley of North Essex today. This area of Essex has the lowest rainfall and the highest sunshine hours in the UK, making it ideal for viticulture, as the Romans in nearby Colchester found out 2000 years ago.

The event was reached by way of a tiny single-track lane and was a very pleasant and genteel gathering. I walked around the vineyard taking pics and talked turkeys with a chef. 

I brought some wet walnuts home for MrQ and he had them with port and cheese. The nearly white, juicy, fresh kernels are mild, milky and sweet with just a hint of tannin. The contraption in my pic is a machine from around 1925 that is still used to remove the green skins from the nuts.

My mother-in-law was a greengrocer in London before supermarkets and her trade was closely tied to seasonal home-grown produce. It's a bit of a shame that many young people have little knowledge of our traditional British food seasons.