noix de grenoble (and photos of Pappy!)

What we call ‘walnuts’, the French – and a few others too – call Noix de Grenoble.






















Grenoble is one of the world’s largest walnut producing areas -- and one of the oldest -- and our locale is the AOC region for walnuts in France, and the “Protected Label of Origin” for wanuts by the European Union. Between 1927 and 1938 they were even called “Noix de Tullins” instead…but obviously Tullins could not hold out against Grenoble.
All that to say:

We got lots.
Vraiment beaucoup.

(photo of merely one day's gathering....)


The harvest is over.
As we live right smack in the middle of walnut groves, we have been exceedingly aware of the process – not just on the small scale of being kept busy with our own four trees (noyers), but with the medium-scale and large-scale of our nut-farming neighbours. (In fact, you can even order products internationally from Stéphane -- www.polinoix.com -- and soon you’ll be seeing some familiar noix-photos on his site!) For three weeks we had a continuous background noise of nut-drying-fans -- several fields away, but none-the-less audible – excepting for when the power cut out one afternoon, leaving the countryside wondrously quiet with bird-song.

The nuts fell over a month, but most within two weeks. Each night, all through the night, I would hear “rustle, rustle, thunk!” Again and again. (Greg keeps his good ear down...)


And what we don’t know about walnuts now!
We’ve had multiples of friends help us pick our own nuts, each getting to personally experience ‘walnut brown’ hands, as the clear juice off the green shells slowly darkened into incontrovertible evidence of their participation. And then stayed for a week or two. What some of our ‘citified’ neighbours have called ‘peasant hands’ (don’t let ‘em fool you about what the Revolution really changed…), our farming neighbours proudly display as a sign of hard work. And some of their hands are as brown as brown can get before it turns to black! Ours just looked wimpy in comparison!



While the hands-effect qualified as a ‘cool factor,’ the more immediate pleasure of walnut picking was eating freshly peeled walnuts. Considered a delicacy amongst those in the know – especially in Eastern Europe we’re told – peeled walnuts require a lot more patience than most of our North American and British friends were willing to give (hmmmm, why is that?). Walnut gourmands enjoy sitting around chatting, while peeling away the layer of skin that surrounds the exposed nutmeat. It does take a few minutes. The motivation is that when the nuts have just fallen from the tree, the skin is still a little bitter -- it is only when as it dries out that the bitterness fades. The nutmeat without the skin is an almost creamy nut-butter. Lovely. And one of the few remaining solely seasonal – and situational -- delights.

(here an obviously local canine eagerly awaits the negligible skins Madame and I are peeling off the nuts. Meanwhile Mme and I are discussing how, although men always seem to complain that women talk too much, at least women can work while they talk…and the men in front of us were displaying all too clearly that that was not the norm for them! Some stereotypes are truly cross-cultural…! ±)

Walnuts have to be adequately dried before they are stored, so that they don’t rot. For the modern walnut farmers with their noisy driers, this takes two days of drying. For us, doing the old-fashioned method of laying them out on a large dry flat surface (‘séchoirs’ are an integral part of the architecture of any old house around here), it takes a few weeks, and requires over-turning them every other day. Greg and some friends jury-rigged their own 'nut-elevator method' for getting the nuts up onto the drying platform.


(and yep, those are souvenir hospital trousers....)

Mechanization has changed walnut farming as much as every other sort of farming – though for the medium-scale farmers it still requires/allows for a more social element than many other areas of farmwork. (The death of community in farming through mechanization is a topic of conversation far too familiar, even in broken French with our neighbours).




The nut-sorting process still requires the human senses of sight and touch, however, and this is perhaps why these great photos below -- by Greg's dad -- are among my favourites. That, and knowing the personalities pictured therein. And the generational task that it remains. Even Madame, increasingly taken over by Alzheimer’s, can cheerfully participate to full effect – indeed, as far as we could tell, she was a far sight more effective than Pappy! The photo of the walnut-tree-shaker above (incredible that the trees survive such abuse…the old adage is that one ‘beats a walnut’, but this is battery!) and that of Mme and I, were also taken by Greg’s dad. Many thanks!



















Ahhh – a note on pickled walnuts, as so many of you with British connections have asked…No, we did not pickle walnuts this year – sorry! And it’s too late now, as that’s done in June, the same time at which one makes ‘Vin de Noix’ – a local delicacy made by soaking 40 walnuts picked on St John’s Day in a red wine concoction (everyone has a ‘family recipe’), for 40 days. (Picked up the symbolism anyone?) For both the pickles and the wine, one uses the entire nut and case – what is called a green nut. Maybe next year!
[btw, the French don't really seem to go for the nut-pickling like the English.....]