Brazil Nuts!

Hemmer call it Moho Inglês but with the fancy subtitle “Tipo Worcestershire”.

As someone who enjoys the spicy, tomatoey goodness of a Bloody Mary, I learned pretty soon after I arrived in Brazil that Worcestershire Sauce is sold here under a different name: Molho Inglês. This translates as ‘English Sauce’ which strikes me as an utterly sensible name considering:

1. “Worcestershire” is a bit of an awkward mouthful, even for native speakers. For anyone who doesn’t know, the proper pronunciation is: ‘WUSS-ter-sha’ – that final syllable does not rhyme with “hire”!

2. Why should anyone in Brazil care if this sauce originated in Worcestershire, Leicestershire or Westward Ho!? For people living more than 5,000 miles away, “England” seems accurate enough.

Well, not long after I made the Molho Inglês discovery, I made another one, but this time the shoe was on the other foot! On my first visit to a Brazilian street market I saw that the nuts I had been calling “Brazil” all my life were in fact named after one of the large states in the Amazon region, Pará.

The enormous northern state of Pará – second largest in Brazil.

The full name is Castanha do Pará, which, from a Carioca at least, sounds like ‘cash-TAN-ya doh pa-RAH’ – (“Castanha” means chestnut).

“Interesting” I thought, “so while the rest of the world just calls them Brazil nuts, the Brazilians get a little more specific and name them after the state of their origin”. That seemed like a reasonable conclusion at the time, but I’ve since learned there is a little more to it than that.

Brazil Nut trees (Bertholletia excelsa) are massive, growing up to 50 metres and living 500 years or more. They are native to a large area of northern South America including Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, the Guianas as well as Brazil.

One of the tallest trees in the Amazon.

The ‘nuts’ that we are so familiar with are actually seeds that form inside a large, heavy spherical capsule called an ‘endocarp’, which looks a bit like a coconut.

Extra endocarp protection (as if they need it!). A farmer up in Amazonas actually died when one of these landed on his head. I wonder if it was dropped by an African Swallow…

In the northern states where the trees grow, the nuts are often eaten fresh – apparently they have a very different flavour and texture, somewhat reminiscent of coconut. Sadly they don’t last long in their fresh state, so the rest of us have to make do with the nuts that have been subjected to a drying process.

Nutritionally, Brazil nuts are petty spectacular. They are so rich in oil that they burn like a candle and they also have the highest levels of selenium of any food. 1 nut more than takes care if your daily requirement and they say any more than 8 in a day can lead to selenium toxicity. I remember reading somewhere that tuna is the food with the second highest level of selenium, but to get the equivalent of one Brazil nut you’d have to eat 2 cans!

Delicious, but don’t eat the whole box or you’ll risk selenium poisoning!

Name Controversy

So, foreigners call them “Brazil Nuts”, Brazilians call them “Castanhas do Pará” right? Well, not exactly. Most Brazilians traditionally called them Castanhas do Pará, but people in the northern state of Acre (which actually produces more nuts than Pará) call them (you guessed it) Castanhas do Acre. Apparently some people even call them Castanhas da Amazônia to reflect the fact that they are found all over the Amazon basin.

Then, not so long ago, the Brazilian ministry of agriculture officially renamed them Castanhas do Brasil. The justification given for the name change was that the nuts came from several different Brazilians states and I guess they wanted to get everyone to settle on a single name. Take a wild guess at how the people of Pará reacted…

The following quote is the reaction of one reader from Pará when excellent Brazilian food blogger Neide Rigo had the nerve to refer to Brazil nuts as “Castanha do Brasil” with added an explanation: “(after all, they don’t just come from Pará)”:

It is Brazilians like you who are causing Brazil to lose its riches by disrespecting the customs, traditions and history of their own country. […] I’m not going to identify myself because it’s not worth discussing this with you seeing as you’ve already made such a point of emphasising the new name by saying “after all, they don’t just come from Pará”.

Well, pay attention because pretty soon they will be called Castanha da Bolívia because Bolivia is now the greatest producer. That’s if we follow your logic and that of others who find fertile ground in the minds of Brazilians for their evil ideas!

-Anonymous

Woah! Nuts is definitely the word isn’t it? Neide has since reverted to calling them Castanhas do Pará, presumably to avoid similar outbursts.

Even the state government of Pará has gotten in on the act. Here is an image they shared on Facebook:

“This is not called Castanha do Brasil! This is called Castanha do Pará”. I got this image from the blog of Altino Machado who made the observation that the government of Pará would do better to defend the the tree itself by coming down from the top of the list of states which most devastate the Amazon forest.

My initial reaction to all this was: what an overreaction! What does it matter what we call them? But then I’m almost certain that the people of Worcestershire would react in just the same way if the British government sent out an order saying we should now all call it “English Sauce”.

Personally I don’t mind what you call these things – as long as the castanhas do pará are crunchy and my Bloody Mary is well spiced, I’ll be happy!