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Pine for Food

As far as food is concerned, pines are best known as a source of edible seeds. Pine nuts, sometimes called pine kernels, are generally harvested by collecting the cones and opening them over heat. Technically, all pine seeds are edible, but most species produce seeds that are simply too small to be of use as human food. Edibility is conferred by size, meaning a seed containing a kernel large enough to be worth collecting and freeing from its shell. Of the twenty or so species whose seeds are used as food, Italian stone pine, cultivated in many parts of the Mediterranean region since ancient times, is an important source. Other Eurasian species that yield nuts are Swiss stone pine, chilgoza pine of the western Himalayas, dwarf Siberian pine and Korean pine. In North America single-leaf pinyon and Colorado pinyon (P. edulis) are probably the most important providers, growing from the central and eastern parts of California through Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and southwest Colorado. Sugar pine, gray pine, Coulter pine, king pinyon and Mexican pinyon also have edible kernels. Some are of local importance – king pinyon, for example, is a rare tree with a population estimated at 2,500. Its nuts are much prized, but it is harvested in such a destructive manner that its very survival as a species is threatened.1

There are subtle variations between pine nuts from different species. They are all about a centimetre long, but vary in shape from a narrow, pointed oval (Italian stone pine), through slim, narrow rods like very large rice grains (chilgoza pine), to slightly triangular, the shape of a sweetcorn kernel (Far Eastern species such as Korean pine) and plump, rounded shapes a little longer than wide, with a slight point at one end (pinyon pine nuts). Pine nuts are off-white to ivory in colour. Those of Italian stone pine are by far the best known to Westerners; they have a crisp texture and a flavour described by Gillian Riley as gentle and slightly resinous, brought out by toasting, gentle frying or baking, but ‘their ephemeral aroma can soon turn to rancidity. Nuts with a dark patch at the narrow end are to be avoided.’² Fresh pinyon nuts have a moist, tender texture with a slight sweetness in the flavour, and the nuts of Himalayan chilgoza pine are quite oily with a distinct almond note. Pine nuts generally are nutritious, although the proportions of major nutrients (protein, fat and carbohydrate) differ between those from different species. Italian stone pine nuts have a high protein content (34 per cent) and nuts of many species contain anywhere between 40 and 75 per cent fat, although those from single-leaf pinyon have a relatively low fat content of 23 per cent. Carbohydrate content varies widely, from 7 per cent in Italian stone pine nuts to up to 54 per cent in those from single-leaf pinyon.³

Pine nuts in their shells: on the right, the slender shape from the Himalayan chilgoza (P. gerardiana); on the left, the more triangular shape from the North American single-leaf pinyon, P. monophylla.

A footnote to the use of pine nuts as food is a phenomenon called ‘pine mouth’. This occurs when someone develops a persistent metallic or bitter taste in their mouth one to two days after eating pine nuts. The sensation can persist for several days to up to two weeks, decreasing the enjoyment of food. It is not, apparently, an allergy, or linked to rancidity in the nuts.4 Still under investigation by scientists, nuts from Chinese white pine (P. armandii), perhaps from varieties of this species that have not hitherto entered the market, are thought to be a likely cause.⁵ The demand for pine nuts on world markets is high, and China has become a major supplier.

Pine nuts took their place in Eurasian traditions in a system in which all foods were considered to have specific health benefits, and Pomet remarked that they contained a great deal of oil, were ‘pectoral, restorative’, and ‘sweeten and correct the Acrimony of Humours, increase Urine and Seed, cleanse Ulcers of the Kidneys, resolve, attenuate, and mollify; and may be us’d internally and externally’.⁶ He was repeating a very ancient and widespread belief. Apart from their intrinsic qualities of flavour and texture, pine nuts were considered to be aphrodisiac in the ancient Mediterranean world and further east. Galen recommended a mixture of pine seeds, honey and almonds to be taken on three consecutive evenings to increase sexual potency.⁷

The native home of Italian stone pine is unknown because of its long history of cultivation and use, and the earliest history of the use of pine nuts is obscure. Modern European recipes are usually of Mediterranean origin, or at least influenced by Mediterranean habits. Through the long development and transmission of cookery traditions, they have become known throughout Europe, but it is clear that people from countries north of the Alps (many of whom must only have known pine nuts as imports from distant shores) were not, on the whole, as confident with them as those from areas in which the pines grew.

Several recipes that include pine nuts are recorded in the late-Roman compilation of recipes known under the name of Apicius. One is for forcemeat faggots, made of chopped meat with fresh white breadcrumbs soaked in wine and seasoned with pepper, fish sauce and myrtle berries. ‘You shape the faggots with pine nuts and pepper placed inside. Wrap them in caul fat and roast them.’⁸ The habit of putting a few pine nuts in meat mixtures has persisted over the centuries, perhaps reaching its most complex in Kofta Mabrouma, a speciality of Aleppo in Syria, in which a mixture of minced lamb, grated onion and egg is pounded to a pasty consistency, then made into long rolls, each containing a centre of pine nuts; they are formed into circles, each one decreasing in size, and baked in a round tray.⁹

Manuscript illumination to the Taccuinum Sanitatis (before 1400), showing harvesting of pine cones. Pine nuts were considered warm and dry in the Galenic system of humours; good for the bladder, kidneys and libido.

Pine nuts were added to Roman sauces for vegetables and eggs, and to patina – like a thick omelette – with numerous other ingredients, including liquamen (a salty condiment made from fish) and defrutum (made by boiling down grape juice), combinations at once savoury, sweet and a little sour. Such agrodolce mixtures, still including pine nuts, have survived to the present day in Sicilian cookery. In the eastern Mediterranean, a scatter of toasted pine nuts adds texture and flavour to many other dishes, especially rice pilaus and vegetables stuffed with rice or meat mixtures such as dolmades (stuffed vine leaves) or aubergines. They provide texture to salads, giving an interesting crunch, and are still added to meatballs not too far removed from the ones detailed by Apicius. They are also scattered over kibbeh, a Lebanese dish of raw meat pounded to a paste with bulghur wheat.

Pine nuts add body and flavour to pesto, a classic sauce closely associated with the Italian city of Genoa. For this, garlic, pine nuts, a little salt and a great deal of fresh basil are pounded together using a pestle and mortar to achieve a soft, creamy consistency. The mixture is enriched with grated cheese, either parmesan or pecorino sardo, and thinned with olive oil. Similar sauces have been made since Roman times, using herbs and nuts in various combinations, and the Genoese version was not recorded in print until the late nineteenth century. It is probably the best known example of a pine-nut based food in the twenty-first century. Claudia Roden called it ‘the prince of Ligurian dishes’ and provided an excellent recipe in her book The Food of Italy.10

This sauce is so closely identified with northwestern Italy that it is commonly referred to as pesto genovese, and the Genoese claim that only basil grown in the environs of Genoa gives the true flavour. It is mixed with pasta cut in wide ribbons, or eaten as a sauce with other foods. Since the 1980s, outside Italy pesto has become ‘fossilised . . . into an industrial product eaten almost exclusively with pasta’,¹¹ and one that does no favours to this delicious sauce. Within Italy, it is actually a much more variable sauce, not always made with pine nuts.

The early European belief that pine nuts, as Pomet said, ‘increase seed’ (male sexual potency) seems to have led to their incorporation into a number of quasi-medicinal candy recipes. One example, ‘Pleasant cordial tablets which are very comforting, and strengthen nature much’, was recorded in the mid-seventeenth century by the English nobleman Sir Kenelm Digby:

Take four ounces of blanched Almonds; of Pine Kernels and of Pistachios, [of each] four Ounces, Eringo-roots, Candid-Limon peels, [of each] three Ounces, Candid Orange peels two Ounces, Candid Citron-peels four Ounces, of powder of white Amber, as much as will lie upon a shilling; and as much of the powder of pearl, 20 grains of Amber-greece, three grains of Musk, a book of leaf gold, Cloves and Mace, of each as much as will lie upon a three pence; cut all these as small as possible you can. Then take a pound of Sugar, and half a pint of water, boil it to a candy-height, then put in the Amber-greece and Musk, with three or four spoonfulls of Orange flower water, Then put in all the other things and stir them well together, and cast them upon plates, and set them to dry; when both sides are dry, take Orange-flower-water and Sugar, and Ice them.12

Pine nuts, basil, garlic, pecorino: some ingredients for pesto genovese.

Young Italian stone pines planted along a roadside in the Appenines.

This recipe probably shares a common origin with penande, a candied confection of pine nuts with sugar, honey, mace and cloves recorded in a late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century English manuscript.13 Such confections represented a widespread European tradition of sweet mixtures, more or less pleasant to eat, which involved ingredients considered to be good for particular health problems, or to be cordial – good for the heart, keeping the body in optimum health. The early belief in pine nuts, almonds and honey as aphrodisiacs probably gave rise to many such sweets. Pinoccata, now a speciality of Perugia but once made all over Italy, is a confection of pine nuts and chopped candied peel mixed with sugar syrup spread over wafers, and they are added to panforte, a mixture of ground nuts and fruit associated with Siena.

Pine nuts are incorporated into confectionery and other foods all around the Mediterranean. These almond paste balls rolled in pine nuts are of North African origin.

Other confections made with pine nuts include various marzipantype mixtures of sweet almond paste rolled in or otherwise decorated with pine nuts, linked to the traditions of the Muslim cookery of the Mediterranean coast of North Africa. Pine nuts are added to baklava fillings and scattered over cakes. Sweets made from pine nuts in the manner of sugared almonds, panned with thin, crisp sugar shells, are known both in Italy and Spain.

A much more unusual use of pine nuts was recorded in late seven teenth-century Italian collections: for ice creams. To make sorbetta di torrone,

you need a third [of a rotolo, which was around 800g] of Naples pine kernels, half a quarter of almonds, put into fresh water a day before use, and if there is not time, use really hot water so that they swell up quickly, and rub them well with your hands to make them turn white, and then pound them altogether several times, moistening them with some of the water and strain. . . you need three quarters of sugar. Ambergris or musk as flavouring, and you need a tornese of well ground coriander seeds, diluted in half a giarra [a jar, a local measurement of liquid] of water, strained into the said ice when it is grainy; you also need to add two ounces of almonds chopped in four, or two ounces of pine kernel comfits.14

Pine nuts are occasionally mentioned in connection with other early-Italian ice-cream recipes, and in the twentieth century Annissa Helou recorded a Lebanese one using pine-nut ‘milk’ thickened with mastic and salep.¹⁵ She also describes collecting pine cones during holidays in the mountains, and attempting to open them between two stones:

The secret was how to scale the strength of the hit so that we broke the shell without crushing the nut, a feat which we occasionally achieved. They [pine cones] can also be eaten green. The fresh ripe cone is cut with a knife into wedges and the soft, fleshy pine kernels are taken out, dipped in salt and eaten whole.¹⁶

Another part of the world where people relished pine nuts is northern India and the Afghanistan region of the Himalayas, where ‘One tree, one man’s life in winter’, a proverb from Kunawar, refers to the seeds of chilgoza pine.¹⁷ The Latin name remembers Captain Alexander Gerard (1792–1839), who mentioned pine nuts several times under different local names, including a ‘pine called Ree which bears the Neosa nut’. For him, like many people of British descent, pine nuts seem to have been a novelty and he struggles to describe them, saying that ‘in shape and taste it very much resembles the pistachio’.¹⁸ Pine nuts also play a role in the food of the native people of Siberia, where they are pressed for oil.¹⁹ Used uncooked in salad dressings and the like, various health claims are made for pine-nut oil, including that it benefits the digestive system and acts as an appetite suppressant.

In North America, native peoples made extensive use of the nuts of various pine species, probably spreading them along trails by dropping seeds accidentally. Evidence for human use of pine kernels among the early inhabitants of North America starts around 6,000 years ago with charcoal and seed shells from single-leaf pinyon at Gatecliff shelter in central Nevada.20 Spanish colonists, as inhabitants of the Mediterranean world, were familiar with pine nuts as food. Their name for pine, piñon, gave pinyon as a collective term for pines with edible nuts in this area, because Spanish explorers were familiar with Italian stone pines and recognized these trees as similar. The survivors of a Spanish shipwreck in 1528 wandered from the Gulf coast to California, on their way observing that some natives ate pine nuts ‘better than those of Castile because they have very thin shells’.²¹ Sixteenth-century Spanish expeditions continued to record the use of pine nuts among the natives of the area, and later ones were saved from starvation by gifts or purchases of food, including pine nuts, from local natives.

Settlers of northern European origin, crossing to California from the 1840s onwards, came from areas in which pine trees produced seeds too small to be worth eating. They nearly starved when passing through Nevada, apparently unaware that the trees around them carried crops of nutritious seeds. Colonists of northern European origin in the southwestern USA tended to overlook the significance of pine nuts in aboriginal life. ‘Very few of our native species are looked upon as having any economic importance in these days of the white man’, said Californian botanist Willis Linn Jepson in 1909.²² Nineteenth-century northern Europeans would have had little experience of pine nuts on their home territory, and therefore lacked the knowledge to investigate American pine trees as sources of food.

Jan Davidsz. de Heem’s Still-life with a Tazza and an Ornamented Cup, 1653, oil on canvas, showing pine nuts in the filling of a rich pie.

In native North American tribal myth, pinyon pine and its nuts are entwined with the notion of origins. The Navajo say it was planted by the squirrel and that the nuts were food for the early peoples, while others believe it to be the oldest of trees and the provider of food to people of the past.23 Some of the most striking monuments of human occupation in the area, the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde, are built in pinyon woodland, in part perhaps because of this rich and easily available supply of food, which allowed a surplus of energy for settlement building. Gray pine took a (now-disused) common name, ‘digger pine’, from the contemptuous term European settlers gave to native tribes in the American southwest. It derived from their habit of digging for edible roots in spring and summer, but applied to pine trees also indicated their use of seeds from its massive cones (gray pine cones can weigh up to 1 kg each).

Records tell how various tribes went to the pinyon woods to collect nuts; in the case of single-leaf pinyon they were in competition with jays, and collected the cones while they were still young and green, opening them using fires.²⁴ The writer and naturalist John Muir described this harvest in the 1870s among the Paiute tribe, saying how members of the tribe made ready their beating poles and collected bags, baskets and sacks. Those working for white settlers left their employment and gathered with the rest of the tribe, everyone mounted on ponies, then they started out

Alfred Hartley, Stone Pine in Moonlight, late 19th or early 20th century, print.

in great glee to the nut-lands, forming curiously picturesque cavalcades; flaming scarfs and calico skirts stream loosely over the knotty ponies, two squaws usually astride of each, with baby midgets bandaged in baskets slung on the backs or balanced on the saddle-bow; while nut-baskets and water-jars project from each side, and the long beating-poles make angles in every direction. . . . the squaws with baskets, the men with poles ascend the ridges to the laden trees, followed by the children. Then the beating begins right merrily, the burrs fly in every direction, rolling down the slopes, lodging here and there against rocks and sage-bushes, cached and gathered by the women and children . . . Smoke-columns speedily mark the joyful scene of their labors as the roasting fires are kindled, and, at night, assembled in gay circles garrulous as jays, they begin the first nut feast of the season.25

Muir said of single-leaf pinyon, or nut pine as he called it, that ‘A more contentedly fruitful and unaspiring conifer could not be conceived.’²⁶ It was ‘quite the most important food-tree on the sierra’, the nuts being ‘sweet to every palate, being eaten by birds, dogs, squirrels, horses and men’.27

North American native peoples prepared the nuts in various ways. First they shelled them on a metate (saddle quern), then they could be eaten raw or whole, ground into nut butter and spread on freshly made corncakes, or made into soups or mushes. For some Native Americans they were merely a supplement to other foods, but for others, such as the Great Basin Shoshone, Northern Paiute and Washo, they were staple foods, deeply embedded in their culture.²⁸ Green cones from gray pines were also used, after being twisted off the trees by hand in the spring. They were beaten with a stone, the covering was peeled off and the nuts, which were soft-shelled at this stage, were eaten shell and all. The pithy centre of the cone was roasted in hot ashes to give a slightly sweet food.²⁹

Sugar pine also provided nuts. Jepson recorded how in autumn

the tribe went on a long journey to the high mountains . . . where the Sugar Pines grow on the ridges, and celebrated . . . by tree-climbing contests among the men. The large cones of the Sugar Pine carry a goodly supply of small but very sweet-kerneled seeds.³⁰

The nuts were harvested by climbing the very tall trees and swaying the branches until the cones twisted off. The pitch was burned off and the nuts were extracted and winnowed. Sometimes they were pulverized until they had the consistency of peanut butter. This nut butter was made specially for feasts and eaten with acorn soup.³¹

Pine seeds have led botanists to new species at least twice. David Douglas discovered sugar pines when his curiosity was aroused by some exceptionally large pine seeds in a smoking pouch belonging to a local Indian in northern Oregon. More recently, king pinyon was discovered after its seeds were found for sale in a Mexican market.³²

On a practical note, for those who have managed to obtain unshelled pine nuts, the shells vary in thickness. Those of chilgoza pine are thin and delicate and can be cracked between the fingers. The shells of nuts from pinyon pines are tougher, and need gentle pressure from something like a rolling pin to crack the shells (but with too much pressure, the kernel smashes and is useless). Cracking them between the teeth is not to be recommended, as the shells are hard. Store pine nuts in a cool place or freeze them (in which state they will keep indefinitely). If you are lucky enough to have fresh pinyon nuts, leave them in their shells and store in paper or cloth bags in a cool place. They will dry out and ‘cure’ as they age, losing their fresh, soft texture and shrinking. Once cured, they keep well. Many recipes call for pine nuts to be toasted lightly before they are added to dishes, especially when they are to be scattered over rice or salads as garnishes. This enhances their texture and brings out their slightly resinous flavour.

Apart from providing nuts, pine trees are not an obvious source of food, but a few other food uses are recorded. One of the most curious is the ‘pine honey’ of southwestern Turkey and Greece. As culinary historian Mary Isin explains, this is not honey in the true sense (pine trees do not flower and therefore do not produce nectar), but an insect-derived food, a form of manna: honeydew produced by the scale insect Marchalina hellenica.

Known as balsıra, the honeydew is deposited on the branches of some pine species, particularly the Turkish pine . . . by the immature insects. During the hot summer months the quantity of the saccharine liquid increases and attracts bees, which collect this syrup instead of nectar from flowers. During the balsıra season Turkish beekeepers from far afield transport their hives to the pine forests of the region.33

This practice has been known since the seventeenth century, when an account was given of pine honey, how it was gathered by hand and

the remaining honey is left on the trees and the bees of the province come to those pine-clad mountains and carry it away to their nests in their hives and make great combs of honey that are famous in the four corners of the world as Sıgla or Sivrihisar honey, which has a fragrance like musk and raw ambergris . . . and from this is made strained honey as white as muslin that is sent as gifts to magnates and gentry.34

Other pine products in Turkey include pine syrup and çam reçeli, a jam made from young pine cones. The use of pine for food and flavouring by traditional rural communities around the world is far more extensive than written sources suggest.

Sugar pine takes its common name from the sugary sap (not resin) that exudes from deep wounds to the tree. Indigenous North Americans used this before Europeans brought sugar to the Pacific northwest as a sweetmeat. John Muir said:

The sugar, is to my taste the best of sweets – better than maple sugar. It exudes . . . in the shape of irregular, crisp, candy-like kernels . . . Indians are fond of it, but on account of its laxative properties, only small quantities may be eaten.

This is not sugar in the sense of cane- or beet-derived sucrose, but a sugar-alcohol called pinitol (monomethyl D-inositol).³⁵ Resin from other pine species, such as ponderosa pine and gray pine, was also chewed like gum.

Apart from these uses, pine trees seem mostly to have provided starvation or subsistence foods, or to have been used for medicine. Aylmer Bourke Lambert said:

We are informed by Linnaeus that the Laplanders eat, during the winter, and sometimes even during the whole year, a preparation made of the inner bark of the pine . . . called, among these people, bark-bread. . . . the dry and scaly external bark is carefully taken off, and the soft, white, fiborous and succulent matter collected and dried. . . . When the natives are about to convert it to use, it is slowly baked on the coals, and being thus rendered more porous and hard is then ground into powder, which is kneaded with water into cakes and baked in an oven.³⁶

The characteristic shapes of Italian stone or umbrella pines, seen here in the Strophylia Forest in Greece, are part of the Mediterranean landscape.

Similar practices were reported among the native peoples of the eastern USA, especially using eastern white pine, and the American outdoorsman Euell Gibbons decided to try cooking and eating it. He boiled some inner bark from white pine ‘and it reduced to a glutinous mass from which the more bothersome wood fibers were easily removed. . . . palatability left much to be desired’. Following the reported native practice of cooking the bark with meat, he ‘tried boiling some with beef, but . . . felt that instead of making the bark edible I had merely ruined a good piece of beef’. Dried, powdered and made into a kind of bread, he found the bark had a slight turpentine smell and a taste that, while initially very sweet, was followed by persistent bitterness and astringency. He also experimented with candying peeled new shoots of white pine, a practice recorded among New Englanders (‘I would have considered it a pretty good tasting cough medicine . . . but I’m sure I have eaten much better confections.’). Pine needles are rich in vitamins A and C. Eventually he concluded that

Pine Needle Tea, made by pouring 1 pint of boiling water over about 1 ounce of fresh white pine needles chopped fine, is about the most palatable pine product I have tasted. With a squeeze of lemon and a little sugar it is almost enjoyable.37

Gibbons was not reliant on gathered foods; people in the past were less fortunate. In his diary, David Douglas recorded arriving at Spokane to find that his host there had no food to offer; Mr Finlay and his family had been living for six weeks on the roots of camas (Camassia quamash, a member of the lily family) and

a species of black lichen which grows on the pines. The manner of preparing it is as follows: it is gathered from the trees and all the small dead twigs taken out of it, and then immersed in water until it becomes perfectly flexible, and afterwards placed on a heap of heated stones with a layer of grass or leaves between it and the stones to prevent its being burned; then covered with the same material and a thin covering of earth and allowed to remain until cooked, which generally takes a night. Then before it cools it is compressed into thin cakes and is fit for use.38

Pine woods are a renowned as a rich source of fungi of various species, including the Polyporus species, in China considered to be an excellent medicine for those wishing to prolong life.

A charming story tells that the smoky flavour of Lapsang Souchong tea was invented by accident

when some soldiers camped in a tea factory filled with fresh leaves and processing was delayed. When the soldiers left the workers realised that it was too late to dry the tea leaves in the usual way if they were to get the tea to market in time. So they lit open fires of pine wood to speed up the drying process.³⁹

And, recalling an ancient belief in the pine cone as a symbol of fertility, tiny fritters of dough, drenched in honey- and orangeflavoured syrup, called pignoccata (entirely unrelated to pine in terms of ingredients but evoking an ancient connection of pine cones with fertility), are made for carnival in Palermo or Christmas in Messina.⁴⁰