HOLLYWOOD—Who knew there was a Walnut Month? When I started looking around the hillside recently, I saw these green/yellow-skinned fruits on trees and rolling around on the ground. What could those be? I saw some spiky looking brown round things on the ground and was certain they must be chestnuts. After stepping on a few as part of my unscientific experiment, I learned they were not chestnuts. Sometimes it takes me a while to put two and two together. After a few weeks, I started to notice that the green nuts which were falling off the trees had turned yellow. Well that’s odd, I thought. Where are the animals that should be eating this stuff? Why is it that they are not being eaten? Something poisonous maybe? After some poking around, I decided the inside looked like a small walnut, but not exactly like the ones you see in the stores. A hybrid of sorts? I know that at some point at the turn of the century, the San Fernando Valley gave up grazing and growing ground crops and turned to tree crops including nuts. There was a huge nut packing plant, Diamond Walnuts, on Chandler Street inNorth Hollywood in the 1920s. Could these hard wrinkled nuts on the ground be escapees from the walnut groves in the Valley? The nuts I was looking at had hardly any meat in them. How, I thought, can anyone make a living from nuts with such little actual food in them?
Meet the Jungians Californica commonly known as the California BlackWalnut. Juglans Californica is native to North America and was an important part of the local Tongva and Chumash diets. They are so important that they are protected plants here in Los Angeles. The city says that if this tree is more than 4 inches in diameter at 4.5 inches above ground you need permission to cut it down, and are advised to consult a specialist before pruning it. In fact, I was recently in court where a homeowner was fined a big chunk of money for trimming a Black Walnut back too much. That was a nasty teaching point.
What makes these trees so special? The native Tongva word for this tree isyopehash kaka-aka. The meat was used as food. There is a contemporary local cuisine that cooks with these wild Black Walnuts. The meat has a much stronger taste than the store bought walnuts we are accustomed to. A useful preparation is to soak the walnut meat for several hours. The walnut can then be used as a meat substitute. It is recommended that you not cook any sort of nuts as that process destroys much of the natural food value. I could not find any resources that suggested that this is how the local Tongva prepared a Black Walnut meal, but it seems like a reasonable possibility.
The Tongvas used Black Walnut hulls, twigs and bark to tan deer hides. The shells were decorated and had differing numbers of holes, similar to the dots on dice. Women used the cracked nuts to play a game of chance, which anthropologists call the Walnut Shell Dice Game.
Apparently this species of the walnut tree is very adaptable, and well suited to the otherwise low growing chaparral vegetation found in the Santa MonicaMountains.
So do we leave these unbelievably tough-shelled nuts to the squirrels, or do we try to horde them ourselves?
