Eight thousand years ago, Scottish islanders roasted hazelnuts on an industrial scale
On Colonsay, a small Scottish island, archaeologists found a shallow pit holding hundreds of thousands of burned hazelnut shells, dated to about 6000 BCE. Every nut was gathered in one year, and pollen suggests the island's hazels were cut down together. With little large game about, the community may have lived mostly on plants.
The Colonsay pit, discovered in 1995, is one of only three such Mesolithic sites known in Britain, the others being Cass ny Hawin on the Isle of Man and Farnham in Surrey. It originally lay on a beach near the shore, next to a hearth and two smaller stone-lined pits whose purpose is still unknown. The scale implies organised, communal work and forward planning by hunter-gatherers.
Hazelnuts are the fruit of trees in the genus Corylus, especially Corylus avellana, and depending on species they are called cobnuts or filberts. A cob is roughly round, 15 to 25 millimetres long; a filbert is about twice as long as it is wide. The nut drops out of its husk seven or eight months after pollination. 'Cobnut' may come from an old word for the head, since children once tied nuts to strings and tried to bonk each other with them. Kentish cobnuts are still hand-picked and eaten green, and growers traditionally boost yields by 'brutting', snapping but not severing the tips of new shoots.
Modern harvests are mechanised. Growers usually wait for nuts to fall in mid-autumn, then a sweeper gathers them into a central row, blasting leaves aside with air moving up to 90 metres per second, and a harvester vacuums away debris. World production in 2023 reached 1.13 million tonnes, and Turkey supplied 57.7 percent. Almost all American hazelnuts come from Oregon's Willamette Valley.
Around Turin, confectioners blended ground hazelnuts with chocolate to make gianduja, the ancestor of Nutella. The nuts also flavour Viennese tortes, Kyiv cake and French dacquoise, and pair with walnuts in Georgian churchkhela. Raw hazelnuts are 61 percent fat, three quarters of it oleic acid. In literature, Julian of Norwich used a hazelnut as a mystical image, and Shakespeare made its shell Queen Mab's chariot in Romeo and Juliet.
Source: Hazelnut
