JIM “PAPPY” MOORE: I’m Nuts for NUTS!

I have always had a thing for nuts. Peanuts. Pecans. Pistachios. Cashews. Walnuts. Almonds. Even Chestnuts roasting on an open fire in winter.

I suppose it all goes back to my childhood. My Dad grew up a poor boy during The Great Depression. Born in 1926, his childhood was a time when poor people were really poor, and Christmas time meant very little in the way of presents and mostly an uptick in edibles. As they might be able to afford it, his family bought and ate nuts and fruit not usually in their budget.

When I was a child in the 1950s and 1960s, Daddy loved buying a wide variety of nuts at Christmas time, along with an assortment of fruit such as oranges. We would sit around cracking nuts and eating them. We used devices to crack those nuts, since most were still in their shell. We didn’t get them already shelled. We got them IN the shell. You had to break them open and dig them out.

There were fancy kits to crack the nuts and get out the meat, as it was called, but we didn’t have those kits. It was a laborious process which often started with a pair of pliers for us. We could only dream of a time like today, when you can buy any kind of nut already cracked open and separated from the hull.

Our feasting on nuts happened mostly in the month of December as part of the Christmas holiday season. We got a few presents at Christmas, but nothing like that which is common today. We got one main present and maybe two or three others. Mama would make all manner of treats, of course, and there would be a big Christmas dinner.

Daddy always made ambrosia and it was a festival of fruit and nuts, garnished with fine slices of coconut. I still remember how we loved Daddy’s ambrosia, and what a feast it was.  For Daddy, the ambrosia, the fruit, the nuts – those were all rewards to himself and to his children. He remembered when he had little and those things meant so much to him. He wanted his kids to see that and to understand that part of Christmas was having those specials items.

I have an odd quirk when it comes to nuts. I will get on some nut and go crazy over it for weeks or months. I can’t get enough of, say, Pistachios. I like the ones which have hulls, so you have to crack them open to eat them. The already hulled ones are too easy. I want to have to work to get them and eat them. I want to use calories while I’m eating calories. Pistachios accomplish that. I’ll eat them and eat them. Then I’ll buy a bigger bag. Finally, I’ll get a HUGE bag of them. A two pound bag. Then somewhere along the line I’ll stop eating them. Daddy would have said I “petered out” on pistachios, although I do not know for certain the etymology of the term. Anyway, I quit eating them and put them aside in favor of the next nut I would go nuts over.

Spanish peanuts, it is time to be my favorite, for a while. I’ll eat them like there is no other nut which compares. For a while. Then I’ll get nutty over pecans. For a while. Then cashews. I rotate these crops, if you will.

I never know how long my delight in one type of nut will go on, and when I’ll switch to another “favorite” until it happens. Here’s looking at you, Daddy!