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There are only two species of these medium-sized, soft-wooded quick-growing trees in central Africa, both prized for their nuts which are about the size of pecans. The nuts are devoured by many animals but the extremely hard-shelled nut within is difficult to crack. Fanshawe says the kernel within is about the size of a Hazelnut, palatable, nutritious, containing 57-63% of edible oil. In Malawi the nuts are roasted under a layer of sand, cracked and the kernel extracted; it is used in stews or eaten as a relish.

A forester in Rhodesia sent this author some Manketti nuts and on the package under the scientific name Ricinodendron, he had written "recovered from elephant dung". This startled me. The nuts are like over-sized pecans which have had smallpox and were covered with pock marks. I wrote the forester to ask why the special inscription, and he replied that there are 3 reasons: (1) The elephants eat the fruits greedily and it is much easier to let the elephants do the job of picking; (2) The seed will not germinate until it has spent a week inside the elephant, and (3) The elephant enjoys the fruit but his digestive mechanism does not affect the extremely hard shell and the nut inside. The natives of Rhodesia, therefore, follow the elephant, recover the hardshelled nuts where they have been dropped, clean and dry them, then crack the extremely hard shell, and find the contents perfectly delicious.

This story is a bit grizzly, but it is part of the nut story and it is only one of a thousand local-colour stories that make this book on nuts entirely different.

Extract from: Edible Nuts of the World by Edwin A. Menninger.

DATE: January 1986

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