The cold facts on Colfax

If you’re in the neighborhood of Colfax, Wisconsin tomorrow, I’ll be playing Viking at a community celebration there. Noon to five. Be there or be somewhere else.

I’ve been thinking about walnuts. In Anders Winroth’s The Age of the Vikings, which I reviewed recently, he talks about walnuts as an exotic treat in Scandinavia at the time. He describes them as tasting sweet.

Walnuts do not taste sweet to me. They taste like slightly crumbly bits of wood.

I’ve long been pretty sure my sense of taste is defective. I seem to be particularly insensitive to sweet-tasting things, which would be why I crave sweet stuff that’s cloying to other people. While mildly sweet things (like walnuts, apparently) don’t register with me at all.

Do you find walnuts sweet?

4 thoughts on “The cold facts on Colfax”

  1. When I eat walnuts, I’m aware of a potential bitter bite. I like them overall, but I’d said a Brazil nut is sweeter, and even then sweet doesn’t seem to be the right word for either.

  2. Your description, “like slightly crumbly bits of wood,” is pretty accurate. I’d just add dry and bitter. Same goes for pecans, which are just skinny walnuts.

    While many seeds are good eating, I firmly believe that the only legitimate use of walnuts is to grow more walnut trees. If I was more spiritual, I’m sure I could find a Bible verse to prove it.

    If I seem a bit grumpy about this, it might be because I was given a lovely muffin this morning, which I saved for my coffee break, only to discover it had been polluted with pecans. My day is ruined.

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