Nut job

Nuts and dairy are my weakness. When I recently took on a fairly extreme detox diet for a few weeks, I felt fantastic, but the two things I missed desperately were dairy and nuts. Milk in my tea, yoghurt for breaky, cheese for treats (the soft ooze of blue castello at room temperature) and, as my only snack, nuts.

I’m keen on any and all varieties. I love the weird chalky texture of macadamias, with the creamy sweetness that shows they are really fresh; the meatiness of walnuts; the exotic taste of pecans; and the feeling you have after eating a handful of cashews that you’ve had a dessert.

My top fave, however, is the humble peanut, or groundnut as it is sometimes called in the Subcontinent. I love them every way – raw or roasted, salted or plain, in or out of their shells. I buy them in bulk: at work I have a big square glass jar that holds a kilo, which is the quantity I buy, raw, from the Indian groceries shop just round the corner from my office. At home, I purchase beer nuts by the two-kilo lot from the wholesaler where we get all our non-perishables. Six bucks a kilo – best value you’ll find anywhere.

The most common nut in the world is technically a legume, and humans have cultivated it for about seven and a half thousand years. Most of the world’s peanuts are grown in China, but a decent percentage are also grown in India, which is where my love affair with peanuts started as a tiny kid.

On my first trip back there after 19 years, in 2003, the first thing I did when I got up after flying in late the previous night, was to walk to a street stall and buy peanuts – poured into a cone of newspaper twisted into shape by the stall owner, exactly as they were in the sixties. Nuts and pulses of various descriptions were piled onto a hand card – a flat wooden platform at about waist level, on top of four bicycle wheels; the seller could trundle his mobile shop to wherever the crowds were.

During our long Christmas holidays, Mum used to take my sister and me to the local swimming pool – the only one in the major city of Ahmedabad (pop around three million back then, way more now). It was a ripper – Olympic size, clean and glistening. The life-saver was a lady clad in a sari, sitting cross-legged in a chair beside the water. Not that she had much to do on her watch – the three of us were the only people there. The genders were strictly segregated; in the men’s times the pool was seething with patrons, but we had the entire place to ourselves.

As we frolicked in the shallow end and did our laps, we were watched in fascintion by dozens of Muslim women in their burquas, fingers hooked through the cyclone wire fence around the pool. Our bathers were modest in the extreme, but in Ahmedabad, where there were hardly any foreigners, the three of us attracted attention walking down the street in Indian attire.

After we’d swum, the ritual was to buy a cone of peanuts at the handcart outside the pool – total cost twenty-five paisa (around ½ a cent in today’s money). We called these our ‘shivery bites’ – my Irish father’s name for something you ate to warm you up after a swim.

Another vivid peanut memory is of sitting in a stationery bus with dad, eating, you guessed it, peanuts, our cupped hands full of them, munching contentedly while we waited to get going again. Suddenly, over dad’s shoulder came a simian arm and hand – a monkey who had entered the bus, perched on the back of our seat was helping itself to its favourite food.

I do flirt with the more glamorous members of the nut family from time to time, but I keep coming back to old faithful. I suspect that eating too many peanuts isn’t good for me. I am happy to give up most things in the pursuit of health, but not peanuts. Like milky tea, the humble groundnut is, for me, non-negotiable.