John Mitchell is a Research Fellow with the Institute of Systematic Botany at The New York Botanical Garden, where he also chairs the Library Committee. He studies the cashew family (Anacardiaceae) worldwide.
The cashew tree (Anacardium occidentale), a native of Brazil, is the source of cashew nuts and the cashew apple. Wild cashew trees occur in the savannas and some coastal forests in northern South America, Brazil, and adjacent Bolivia and Paraguay. Portuguese colonists introduced the cashew from Brazil to their colonies in India and Africa in the late 1500s. Today cashew is cultivated throughout the lowland tropics of the world. The majority of people who live in the tropics use the cashew tree primarily for its cashew apple rather than for the seed (which you know as the cashew nut).
The seed is enclosed in a brown to gray fruit, often called the cashew nutshell, which contains a dermatitis-causing poisonous resin. This resin is chemically similar to that found in poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans), to which the cashew is closely related; they are both members of the same family (Anacardiaceae) along with other commercial crops, including pistachio, pink peppercorn, and mango.
Cashew nuts are roasted or eaten raw after careful separation from the poisonous shell (fruit); chemicals in the nutshell liquid are extracted to produce adhesives, lubricants, solvents, plastics, and antimicrobials. Brake linings of cars and particleboard are two products partially derived from cashew nutshell chemicals. Cashews are also used to make cashew butter, or as an ingredient in cakes, cookies, and candies. Large-scale commercial cashew production is done in Brazil, tropical Africa, India, and Southeast Asia.
The cashew apple is a pear-shaped juicy structure that subtends the fruit and is actually the swollen flower/fruit stalk (pedicel) called a hypocarp. (Above is a photo of an immature cashew fruit and hypocarp developing on a tree, taken by Susan K. Pell, BBG.) The cashew apple can be candied or its juice fermented to make wine or spirits, or it can be used as an ice cream flavoring. The “apple” attracts dispersers such as fruit bats, coatis (relatives of raccoons), monkeys, lizards, and various fruit-eating birds who discard the poisonous fruit and consume the cashew apple.
My apprenticeship with Garden senior curator Dr. Scott Mori in the early 1980s resulted in the publication of a monograph, The Cashew and Its Relatives (Anacardium: Anacardiaceae), published by NYBG Press. The cashew genus, Anacardium, was originally described by Linnaeus and includes 11 species native to South and Central America.
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Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education. Join her each weekend for home gardening demonstrations on a variety of topics in the Home Gardening Center.
Last week I told you of the nutritional merits of beets. Cucumbers can’t make the same clame to nutrition—there is a small amount of vitamin C in a cucumber, but aside from that it is mostly water.
But don’t despair. Cucumbers often show up in face creams, and you’ve no doubt seen the stereotypical facial with two slices refreshing and covering eyes. Cucumbers with their softening, beautifying, and anti-irritant properties have swept the cosmetic world by storm.
For me, cucumbers remind me of my youth. With my childhood culinary bible, The Joy of Cooking, in hand, I set about in late summer to make my annual batch of pickles, with varying rates of success. I took great pride in growing the pickling cucumbers from seed and then seeing them find their rightful place in the cupboard in a jar surrounded by cider vinegar, dill seed, and garlic.
My sister has one of the best smoothie blender, she would toss cucumbers into the blender to whip up her daily cup of gazpacho. The English serve them for high tea in all their simplicity, lightly salted on open-faced sandwiches with mayonnaise or butter. They are an indispensable part of any good crudités.
There are many types of cucumbers for the home gardener to try. There are fancy heirloom cucumbers such as ‘Lemon’, which looks like a strange hybrid between a lemon and a cuke; pickling cucumbers that range from the size of a cornichon to a 6-inch long spear; Burpless varieties with thin skins and mild flavor that are easier to digest; and Asian varieties that are sweet and long with tiny seeds.
If you are trying to decide between growing a slicing (salad) cucumber and a pickling cucumber but only have space in the garden for one variety, know that pickling cucumbers make excellent slicers and slicing cucumbers can be made into pickles. However, you will need to decide how much space you will dedicate to them. Many of the vining cucumbers easily spread 6–8 feet while the more compact bush varieties cover a 2- to 3-foot area. Bush cucumbers, such as ‘Spacemaster’, ‘Salad Bush’, ‘Bush Champion’, and ‘Parks Bush Whopper’ are ideal for containers. Containers should be at least 12 inches deep and will need to be fertilized every 2 weeks with a fish emulsion.
Toby Adams is Manager of the Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden.
Vegetables and kids: two of my favorite things, growing together in the Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden! Each year we open the gates of our one-and-a-half-acre garden to thousands of children and invite them to help us in our annual effort to grow thousands of plants.
Sitting here now, among the tangles of tomato vines heavy with fruit and rows of sunflowers standing tall, it takes a leap of faith to believe this site was nearly bare when we began. Only a short time ago, I’m certain I was sitting in this same spot bundled in countless layers of thermal fabric with my eyes closed imagining the fragrances that envelope me now, straining to hear the drones of the pollinators patrolling the plots, and wondering at what point in the summer the garlic leaves would collapse under the weight of themselves.
A little over one hundred days later, my imaginations have been realized. The freshly harvested basil leaves stain fingers with their pungent perfume, the bees are busy buzzing in and out of the squash blossoms, and the garlic has already been harvested, braided, and hung in the garage to cure.
Brian M. Boom, Ph.D., is Director of the Caribbean Biodiversity Program at The New York Botanical Garden.
Add one more item to the long list of threats that indigenous peoples around the world have to their cultural survival: global warming.
In the past, when the climate changed, indigenous groups could usually migrate to areas where the climate was suitable for their ways of life. Now, with indigenous groups often restricted to territories that are surrounded by farms, ranches, and settlements of more populous and powerful non-indigenous peoples, there is usually no where for them to go. They must endure the climatic changes by adapting; if they cannot adapt, their cultures may become extinct.
While the general problem of climate change to indigenous groups is global, it is also occurring in the Amazon, an area I have studied. A recent New York Times article reported that a drier, hotter Amazonia due to deforestation and climate change is killing off the fauna and flora that indigenous groups of the region depend on for their survival. And I have some data that bear on elucidating the gravity of this issue.
In the 1980s, I teamed up with fellow botanist Ghillean Prance and anthropologists William Balée and Robert Carneiro on a comparative ethnobotanical project with the goal of quantifying the use of trees by four indigenous Amazonian groups. We published the results of our studies in 1987 in the journal Conservation Biology (vol. 1, no. 4) under the title “Quantitative Ethnobotany and the Case for Conservation in Amazonia.” Our main general finding was that these groups had specific cultural uses for between about 50% to more than 75% of the tree species in their territories. This result illustrates just how tightly dependent native Amazonians are on their environment for cultural survival.
Josh Viertel is president of Slow Food USA. He will discuss slow food and the sustainable food movement at this Thursday’s Edible Evening.
I’ve been a farmer and now I live in a city. A really big city. It was an easy decision to move to New York to run Slow Food USA. I have never been presented with a more exciting opportunity. But trading my big garden for Brooklyn this past fall was hard. Cities have their up sides. Particularly this city. I am blown away by the music, art, food, and friends in close proximity. Though I miss living out of my own garden, the farmers markets in New York bring me in contact with real food and real people who grow it. And the fish vendor has changed my life. More than anything, though, I am touched by the green space in New York.
When our concrete landscape tires me, Greenwood Cemetery, Prospect Park, and The New York Botanical Garden all make it possible to slip back into a quasi-natural world. They aren’t strictly natural places—the human hand is all over them—but nature happens there. And the overlay between nature and culture makes the two indistinguishable. As it should be.
But in our city’s green spaces there is one aspect of this link between nature and culture that I miss. It is the oldest one. It is food growing. Urban community gardens and rooftop farms do this beautifully, but their reach is limited when compared to the iconic green spaces in our cities—Prospect Park, Central Park. When we enter these spaces we enter an environment where nature is idealized and where the human hand intervenes to make ballparks, but not food. This teaches a strange lesson to city dwellers. It teaches that the natural world is for inspiration (beautiful, without humans) or it is for recreation (skate trails, t-ball), but it is not for food. (Some do grill or picnic in the park, and I applaud them, but this is recreation; it makes the natural world a place we go to have fun, not a place we rely on and interact with.) Thus, we miss a fundamental link to our natural world.
Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education. Join her each weekend for home gardening demonstrations on a variety of topics in the Home Gardening Center.
Even though beets never seem to make the Top Ten list of favorite vegetables, they deserve a place in everyone’s vegetable garden. Between the beet greens and the beet root, they are an excellent source of vitamins A, C, and several Bs (B1, B2, B6, and folic acid); calcium; manganese; potassium; iron; and fiber. Who would have thought that this sturdy little root vegetable packs so much punch!
Incidentally, you will lose all of these nutrients if you peel the beets before you cook them, causing them to bleed. Cook them unpeeled with a little bit of the tops still intact and then peel and slice them. The minimal bleeding that occurs and any red stains that result can then easily be cleaned up with some lemon juice.
There are many ways to enjoy beets. You can pickle them, boil them, or roast them. Jamie Oliver has a wonderful recipe in which he slices them into hearty chunks and adds some thyme, olive oil, and garlic before wrapping them in tinfoil and tossing them in the oven. How easy it is to add spice to your vegetable life.
I usually mix the greens with Swiss chard. I chop all the greens into smaller pieces and toss them into a wok, first steaming them lightly and then stir frying them with olive oil. Garlic or the sweet Zante currants gets added into the mix depending on my mood.
Uses Architecture as Model, Seasonal Foods as Inspiration
Keith Snow is chef and founder of Harvest Eating.com. He will debut a new PBS TV cooking show in September and will present at The Edible Garden tomorrow.
I am very happy to see the public turning the tide on the recent bad food trends and diets and embracing a seasonal-foods lifestyle. On my Web site, Harvest Eating.com, I have been promoting the idea of cooking with seasonal ingredients for roughly five years now. I have seen the interest in my work reach a fever pitch this year as people are truly attempting to change their eating habits to a more sustainable and community-based approach that includes plenty of local sourcing. This is fantastic and shows that the public is paying close attention to the chefs that are leading the movement. I’d like to think I am among the chefs making a difference in this area.
In preparation for my appearance tomorrow at The Edible Garden, I had been contemplating what my demonstration should comprise. There are plenty of chefs who give rock-star demonstrations that show off their skills in all sorts of culinary focuses, including seasonal cooking. However, I am trying to do something different this time. I want to grant access into the part of my brain that allows me to create recipes. I don’t think enough chefs, or any for that matter, attempt to teach the art of “recipe creation” to the people they encounter at demonstrations or other public events. I will attempt to change that on August 15 in NYC.
I believe that most “foodies” don’t give their own senses enough credit. Most people know what good food looks like, smells like, and tastes like, yet if you ask them to create a recipe without the aid of a cookbook, things go astray. The prospect of creating recipes for most people is daunting. That was the case for me as well for many years. It was only later in my career in food that I became a prolific creator of great recipes. Anybody can create a recipe, right? Let’s see…how about smoked salmon and peanut butter yogurt with chopped onions and grapes? Does not sound too good, huh?
To create great recipes, you need some guidelines, some boundaries, and some building blocks of knowledge to judge the combination of flavors, textures, and smells. You are attempting to create balance.
Scott A. Mori, Ph.D., Nathaniel Lord Britton Curator of Botany, has been studying New World rain forests for The New York Botanical Garden for over 30 years. This evening from 6 to 9 p.m., as part of the Edible Evenings series of The Edible Garden, he will hold informal conversations about chocolate, Brazil nuts, and cashews—some of his research topics—during Café Scientifique.
The Brazil nut is known to most people as the largest nut in a can of mixed party nuts, but other than that, most people know little about it, including that it comes from an Amazonian rain forest tree of the same name or that it is really a seed, not a nut.
The Brazil nut was first discovered by Alexander von Humboldt and Aime Bonpland on the Orinoco River in Venezuela and made known to the scientific world as Bertholletia excelsa in1808. The generic name honors a famous French chemist and friend of Humboldt’s and excelsa refers to the majestic growth form of the tree. Although discovered in Venezuela, this species became known as the Brazil nut because Brazil was, and still is, a major exporter of the seeds.
For the past 35 years my research has focused on the classification and ecology of species of the Brazil nut family. The Brazil nut itself is only one of what I estimate to be about 250 species of that family found in the forests of Central and South America. This number includes nearly 50 species that do not have scientific names, mostly because collectors are usually not willing to climb into tall trees to gather the specimens needed to document their existence. My research on the Brazil nut family has taken me on many expeditions to the rain forests of the New World, and what I have learned about this family of trees can be found on The Lecythidaceae Pages.
The Brazil nut flower is large, roughly two inches in diameter, and fleshy, and the male part of the flower has a structure not found in any other plant family in the world. (See illustration at right by Bobbi Angell.) The fertile stamens are arranged in a ring that surrounds the style at the summit of the ovary. This ring has a prolongation on one side that is expanded at the apex to form a hood-like structure. At the apex of the hood are appendages that turn in toward the interior of the flower.
A small amount of nectar is produced at the bases of these appendages. The fleshy “hood” presses directly onto the summit of the ovary and the six petals form an overlapping “cup” that blocks entry to the flower to all but the co-evolved pollinators.
The Brazil nut is known to be pollinated only by large bees with enough strength to lift up the hood and enter the flower. These bees are presumably rewarded for their efforts by the nectar they collect from the interior of the hood. When the bees are in the flower, pollen rubs off onto their heads and backs from where it is transferred to the stigma of subsequent flowers visited.
Jenny Trotter is the Associate Director of Biodiversity Programs at Slow Food USA. When not at work this time of year, you’ll find her in her kitchen pickling something or experimenting with the week’s Community Supported Agriculture veggies.
Have you ever heard of the Green Newtown Pippin apple? It was first picked on a farm around 1730 in a place we now call Queens. Thomas Jefferson grew it at Monticello and from Paris told James Madison, “They have no apple here to compare with our Newtown Pippin.” But despite its versatility and wonderful flavor, the Newtown Pippin—like hundreds of unique apple varieties—has lost the fight for shelf space to the picture-perfect but mealy and bland Red Delicious.
The Marshall Strawberry (pictured here) tells a similar tale. Did you know that this Massachusetts berry—dating back to 1890—was known as “the finest eating strawberry in the United States?” But as of five years ago, it was on the verge of extinction.
These are stories that will be told at the August 20 Edible Evening, “Preserving America’s Food Traditions.” I’ll be moderating a discussion, Restoring Heritage Varieties to Our Tables, about how home gardeners, orchardists, farmers, and chefs are all playing a role in conserving rare and place-based fruit and vegetable varieties…and how you can, too.
There are many reasons why we should care about preserving these foods, and it’s not because we’re nostalgic for the past or because of taste alone. Many people are starting to realize that our current fuel-intensive, globalized food system is not stable or secure enough to keep feeding us. In a Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture survey last year, only 15 percent of those surveyed felt assured that the global food system is safe anymore. Nearly three-quarters of the respondents felt that local and regional food systems would be more reliable in meeting the future nutritional needs of Americans. But to re-localize our food systems, we need each region to grow the grains, vegetables, fruits, and meats adapted to that climate rather than getting all our fruits from California and our beef from the Great Plains. Sadly, by sheer neglect of their value, we have put at risk nearly two-thirds of all the place-based heritage foods remaining on this continent that are adapted to regional climates, soils, and cultural traditions.
The cashew tree (Anacardium occidentale), a native of Brazil, is the source of cashew nuts and the cashew apple. Wild cashew trees occur in the savannas and some coastal forests in northern South America, Brazil, and adjacent Bolivia and Paraguay. Portuguese colonists introduced the cashew from Brazil to their colonies in India and Africa in the late 1500s. Today cashew is cultivated throughout the lowland tropics of the world. The majority of people who live in the tropics use the cashew tree primarily for its cashew apple rather than for the seed (which you know as the cashew nut).
