hazelnuts/filberts (fwd)

[A. Maberry]

On Mon, 3 Jul 2000, Peter A. McGraw wrote:
>
> You know, I didn't mention this in my original post because I didn't want
> to complicate the picture, but I grew up thinking there was a distinction.
> At some point during my childhood, I figured out that filberts were the
> round nuts and hazelnuts were the elongated ones that tasted the same.  At
> some point later, after we moved to a filbert farm in Oregon, my mother
> explained to me that a filbert was a cultivated hazelnut (hazelnut being
> the wild variety that grows on what is more like a bush than a tree).  That
> explanation squared very well with my perception that they were called
> "filberts" in Oregon where they're grown commercially, and "hazelnuts"
> everywhere else, where people don't know the difference.

That is the distinction I've always made (correctly or incorrectly as the
case may be). I have a bunch of wild hazelnuts on my property and they are
all of the brushy kind. The look nothing like a cultivated filbert tree
that one sees in the Willamette Valley, especially around Dundee, OR. The
nuts themselves are identical.

I don't know if that is some distinction peculiar to Oregon or not, but
here in the Seattle area they seem to be labeled filberts in some of the
grocery stores but are almost always called hazelnuts in speech.

Allen
maberry at u.washington.edu