Cashew season is coming

Cashew season's coming

Those little green kidney-shaped things? Those are the seed pods of the cashew fruit --- marañón in Panamanian Spanish. The seeds --- the cashew nuts you may know from Planter's Mix and so on --- contain poisonous oils that can be neutralized by heat. Usually they are roasted, but they can also be blanched with steam to make them edible. Beware the partially roasted cashews you might buy by the side of the road. If you eat some of those and shortly thereafter get this symmetrical rash all over your body, you ate insufficiently cooked cashew nuts. It's a good idea to take the things you buy at the side of the road home and cook them some more, maybe by mixing them with a bit of vegetable oil, throwing in a bit of salt and toasting them, maybe by firing up the wok and using them as ingredients in some kung pao chicken, or so on.

The tiny green fruits which you see atop the seed pods will get much bigger and ripen into these delicate yellow, red or purple things. The fruit is not well known in temperate climes because it doesn't ship or store well, and the fruit and juice have this astringent taste that not everybody likes. But the juice of the cashew fruit mixes well with those of sweeter fruits, and the Costa Ricans ferment the stuff to make an alcoholic beverage. If you cut cashew fruit into quarters, and then cut those quarters into pieces about a half-inch long, you can candy them in a skillet with just a bit of water and plenty of sugar, putting them on a piece of waxed paper to cool once you have simmered them to reduce the juice and water and get the sugar to start caramelizing.

Photo by Eric Jackson

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