Did the Almighty devise this plant with children in mind? Small enough to let them climb it and relish its nuts. These, suitably reachable and furthermore are crunchy and fulsome in their addictive flavor. Not to mention Monsieur Kohler’s 1830 Lausanne-based devising of chocolate with hazelnuts!
The hazel is a shrub rather than a tree. It is 3–8 m (10–26 feet) high, but can reach 15 m (49 ft). The nut occurs produced in clusters of one to five together, each nut held in a short leafy husk, wrapped around three-quarters of the nut. Hence the name of the genus, since this assemblage looks like a tiny helmet, corylus in Latin, korylos or korys in Greek.
Avellana? The species name derives from Avella Veccia (southern Italy) or from Avellino (city east of Naples where this plant was much cultivated and called nux Avellana by the Romans).The nut is roughly spherical to oval, 15–20 mm ( 5 ⁄ 8 – 3 ⁄ 4 in) long and 12–20 mm ( 1 ⁄ 2 – 3 ⁄ 4 in) broad (larger, up to 25 mm long, in some cultivated selections), yellow-brown with a pale scar at the base. Its name in French, noisette, i.e., “small nut”, appears already in the Roman de la rose (1225-1230).
The fondness for children is transparent in the following poem/song by Tristan Klingsor (1874-1966), Trois noisettes dans le bois / Tout au bout d’une brindille / Dansaient la
capucine vivement au vent / En virant ainsi que filles de roi (Three hazelnuts in the wood / At the end of a twig / Danced the capucine briskly in the wind / Spinning like the king’s
daughters).
The deciduous medium green leaves are rounded, up to 6–12 cm (4 in) long, are rounded to cordate at their base and generally hairy. The hazeltree comes from Asia Minor, present-day Turkey. And Turkey remains the leading producer, about 800 kt yearly.
The two words, “easel” and “hazel,” although near-homophones, have different origins. “Hazel,” from Old English hæsel, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch hazelaar ‘hazel tree’,
hazelnoot ‘hazelnut’, and German Hasel, denotes the green-brown color of the nut. Hence, its denoting by extension an eye color — likewise with the French noisette — which also came into fashion at the turn of the twentieth century as a girl’s first name. Not in French, though.
However, since it refers to a color, it came as a synonym for a café-crême, for ordering in a French café. Une noisette is the French equivalent of the Italian macchiato.
The molecule (S)-5-methylhept-2-en-4-one — forgive me this technicality — is a key flavor compound in hazelnuts.This molecule is highly versatile: simple (poly)methylation completely changes the original hazelnut aroma and shifts the odour of its analogs to eucalyptus, menthol, camphor, and sweet aroma. In addition, hazelnuts show high abundance of oleic acid and polyunsaturated fatty acids, which give them a high nutritional value.
Health benefits ? You bet: daily intake of 30 g (1 oz) of hazelnuts reduces by 30% cardiovascular accidents and by 46% that of a stroke. However, and this took a long time to
be discovered, the husk is even more beneficial than the nut! It contains indeed taxanes, useful chemicals for making taxotere, a leading drug for breast cancer treatment (since 1995
in the European Union) — thus alleviating the need for yews as their source — whether the tree bark or its needles.