Walnuts: The Kernel of Moldova's Autumn
An ordinary clear plastic cup, the kind you'd get a soft drink in. Except this one is filled to the brim with pale, freshly shelled kernels, and in early October you'll come across them everywhere in Chișinău: on market counters between crates of fruit, on cardboard boxes on the sidewalk, in the hands of women vendors shelling them right in front of you.
The walnut (Romanian: nucă) is a staple of Moldovan cuisine - here it fills holiday pastries, prunes and preserving jars alike - and one of the country's export goods. October is when you see it best.
Italian, Wallachian, Greek: Whose Nut Is It Anyway?
Czech pinned it on the Italians - in Czech it's the vlašský nut, and vlašský used to mean Italian. German Walnuss points to the Romance peoples in general, Ukrainian calls it voloskyi - Wallachian, that is, named after the ancestors of today's Romanians and Moldovans - and Russian considers it Greek, after the Byzantine merchants who carried it north. Each language, when it came to naming it, simply pointed at a different foreigner. Romanian sat this game out: nucă descends from the Latin nux and means nothing more than nut. Which leaves one small paradox: it was the Ukrainians, of all people, who named the nut after the Moldovans and their neighbors.
Yet it isn't native to any of them. It grows wild in a long belt stretching from eastern Turkey to northwestern India, the world's largest walnut forests grow around the village of Arslanbob in Kyrgyzstan, and according to Pliny it was the ancient Greeks who brought it to Europe. Whole cuisines now line that belt, and each has made the walnut its own: Georgian cooks grind it into savory sauces and pastes, while in Moldova it mostly ends up wrapped in something sweet - just as it does in Romania.
Kernels for Export and Walnut Trees Lining the Roads
Here, though, the walnut outgrew the kitchen long ago. Moldova ranks among the world's ten largest walnut exporters and is one of the European Union's five main suppliers; almost the entire harvest leaves the country, and it fetches the most shelled - the kernel is what sells, the shell is just packaging for the journey. They say a sizable share of the harvest comes from old avenues of walnut trees along the roads; nobody has ever reliably counted it, but the roadside trees are still standing. And neighboring Romania? It grows more walnuts than any other EU country, but mostly on trees scattered across farms rather than in orchards - the Romanian press gleefully writes of "spontaneous flora" - and it still imports some of its walnuts from Moldova.
From Cozonac to Green Walnuts
In Moldovan cooking, the walnut is first and foremost a filling: ground, it goes into the sweet holiday bread cozonac, scattered between the layers of coiled plăcinte, and whole halves get tucked into dried prunes simmered in red wine - the dessert prune umplute cu nuci. Back home in Czechia, walnuts play the same part: they're gathered under the tree, shelled at the table and disappear into the dough - quiet behind-the-scenes work that no holiday baking can do without. Green, unripe walnuts deserve a chapter of their own. They're picked in summer, while you can still cut through the whole nut, shell and all, and cooked into a dark preserve, dulceață de nuci verzi; green walnuts also go into a homemade liqueur that in Romania is called nucată. And one shared superstition in passing: you're not supposed to sleep under a walnut tree.
The harvest peaks at the turn of September and October, and that's when Moldova's markets change: walnuts are sold by weight, in the shell or shelled by the cup - fresh, not yet dried.
A Cup from a Chișinău Market
I love freshly shelled walnuts - and in early October, Chișinău was full of them. On the sidewalk by the Piața Centrală market (see Where to Eat in Chișinău), a vendor squatted over a sack and, wearing gloves, peeled walnuts straight out of their green husks; she put the shelled kernels into cups on a cardboard box. When I asked if I could take her picture, she struck a pose and went on shelling with a smile. In the end I bought my own cup the next day, a little further on, at a fruit stall, for 50 MDL (2.40 EUR) - which struck me as relatively expensive by Moldovan standards. It was worth it: next to a dried one, a freshly shelled kernel is a different fruit altogether - supple, almost juicy, milky-sweet and without the bitterness we're used to in walnuts. I didn't take any home - I finished the cup right there.
