Origin: The coastal lowlands and cerrado of north-eastern Brazil, the homeland of the wild and cultivated cashew tree and of the Tupi peoples who first prized its fruit
The cashew is one plant that gives two utterly different foods, and a great deal of confusion follows from it. Anacardium occidentale belongs to the Anacardiaceae, the family of the mango, the pistachio, the sumac, and, less happily, the poison ivy, and it shares with its poisonous cousins a caustic oil that shapes its whole story. What the tree bears is, first, a swollen, fleshy, pear-shaped 'apple', brilliant red or yellow, juicy, sweet, and astringent: this is the cashew apple, not a fruit at all but a hugely enlarged flower-stalk, the peduncle. Hanging from its lower end is the true fruit, a hard, kidney-shaped, grey-green drupe, and inside that, protected by a double shell, lies the single seed the world knows as the cashew nut.
The nut is never sold in its shell, and for good reason. Between the shell's two walls runs cashew nut shell liquid, a dark, blistering oil rich in anacardic acid and the same urushiol that makes poison ivy so feared; it raises welts on bare skin and gives off acrid, irritating fumes when burned. The nut must therefore be roasted and laboriously hand-shelled before it can be eaten, which is why, even now, the cashew is one of the most labour-intensive of all the world's nuts and why its processing settled in lands of cheap and skilled hand labour. Unusually amongst the great food plants, the cashew is a single species with a single origin and no clutch of separate domestications: its variety lies not in different kinds of plant but in the two quite different harvests, the perishable apple and the travelling nut, that one tree provides.
The cashew is a Brazilian native that conquered the tropics, and it did so almost entirely in the holds of Portuguese ships. The Tupi of north-eastern Brazil had long valued the cashew, above all the apple, which they ate fresh and fermented into a drink, and the nut, which they roasted; but it was the perishability of the apple and the portability of the seed that decided the plant's future. When the Portuguese reached Brazil they took an interest in the hardy, drought-proof tree, and from about the 1560s they carried it east, planting it first on their Indian territory at Goa, where it was valued at the outset less for food than for binding the crumbling laterite slopes of the coast against erosion. From Goa the cashew spread down the Konkan and Malabar coasts and inland, and India in time became the heart of the world's cashew trade, both the great grower and the great sheller of the nut.
On the same Portuguese tide the cashew crossed to East Africa, taking hold above all in Mozambique, where it became at once a food and, for centuries, a mainstay of the colonial economy; Mozambique was for a long time the largest cashew producer on earth. Carried on along the maritime trade routes of monsoon Asia, the tree reached Siam, the south of China, and the lands of mainland South-East Asia, where the nut entered the wok; in the twentieth century Vietnam rose to become the world's foremost processor of cashews, and West Africa, from Côte d'Ivoire to Guinea-Bissau, the foremost grower of the raw nut. Meanwhile the shelled kernel, mild, rich, and crescent-shaped, travelled everywhere as a luxury snack and, at the turn of the present century, found a wholly new vocation in the Western plant-based kitchen, blended into the creams and cheeses of vegan cooking. From a single tree on the north-eastern Brazilian shore, the cashew had become a crop of every tropical coast and a nut on every continent's table.
The cashew leads two lives. As a nut it is global: the buttery, kidney-shaped kernel is eaten roasted and salted by the handful from Mumbai to Manhattan, and it runs deep through the cooking of the lands that adopted it. India, the greatest consumer of all, grinds it into the silky gravies of the Mughlai korma and the festive cashew curry, and boils it with sugar into kaju katli, the wafer-thin, silver-leafed diamond that is the most prized of all Diwali sweets. The wok kitchens of Thailand and southern China made the stir-fry of chicken and cashews, gai pad med mamuang and yaoguo jiding, into dishes famous the world over, and Vietnam, now the planet's leading sheller of the nut, turns out the salt-roasted cashews, hat dieu rang muoi, that are its own beloved snack. In Mozambique the nut is ground into matapa, the great stew of cassava leaves and coconut, and baked into Maputo's bolo polana.
The cashew apple, by contrast, has stayed close to home, for it bruises and ferments within a day of picking and cannot travel as the nut does. In its Brazilian birthplace it is pressed for the ubiquitous caju juice and clarified into cajuína, the amber, heritage-listed drink of the north-east; in Goa it is distilled into feni, the fierce country spirit that is the Goan liquor above all others. And in the twenty-first century the cashew has been reinvented yet again, this time in the West, where its mildness and high fat let it be soaked and blended into a smooth cream that has become the foundation of vegan cooking, standing in for dairy in everything from cheese to ice cream. Grown across the tropics, processed in Asia, and prized on every table, the cashew is one of the most thoroughly globalised of all the foods the New World gave the Old.
Historical Journey of Cashew
North-eastern Brazil (Ceará and the Tupi Coast) — Pre-Columbian
The cashew is a child of the north-eastern Brazilian shore, the dry, sandy coastal lowlands and cerrado where Anacardium occidentale grows wild and where the Tupi peoples had gathered and tended it long before any European arrived. To the Tupi the prize was first of all the caju, the brilliant red and yellow 'apple', juicy and sweetly astringent, which they ate fresh and pressed and fermented into a drink for their feasts; the kidney-shaped nut that hangs beneath it they roasted on the fire, a roasting that was not merely for flavour but a necessity, for the shell holds a caustic, blistering oil that must be driven off before the kernel can be touched or eaten. The plant is a single species with this single homeland, its richness lying not in many varieties but in the two quite different harvests of one tree: the perishable apple, which bruises and ferments within a day and so could never travel, and the durable, fire-cleaned nut, which could be carried anywhere. It was this division that shaped all that followed, for when the Portuguese came to Brazil in the sixteenth century they found in the hardy, drought-proof cashew a tree worth carrying across the world, and from this coast they would take it to India, to Africa, and on to all the warm shores of the earth. In its homeland the cashew remains, above all, the apple: pressed for the caju juice drunk everywhere in the north-east, clarified into the amber, heritage-listed cajuína of Piauí and Ceará, and ground, nut and all, into the dishes of the Afro-Brazilian kitchen.
The cashew's first landfall beyond the Americas was Goa, the capital of Portuguese Asia, where the Portuguese planted the Brazilian tree from around the 1560s. Their first purpose was not the table but the soil: the cashew's spreading roots were set to bind the crumbling red laterite slopes of the coast against the monsoon rains, an afforestation that took so well that the tree soon ran wild across the Western Ghats and the Konkan littoral. The food uses followed, and Goa made the cashew peculiarly its own. Above all it made feni, the fierce, pungent country spirit double-distilled from the fermented juice of the cashew apple, a drink so bound to Goa that it now carries a protected geographical status and is found nowhere else in quite the same form. The nut entered the Goan kitchen too, toasted into the rich Christian and Hindu dishes of the coast and folded into its sweets. From this Portuguese doorway the cashew spread down the Malabar and Konkan coasts and inland into the subcontinent, and India grew, over the centuries that followed, into the very heart of the world's cashew trade, the greatest grower, sheller, and eater of the nut. The Indian name for it, kaju, is simply the Portuguese caju, carried in with the tree itself.
Northern India and the Mughal Kitchens — c. 1620 CE
From the Portuguese coast the cashew nut travelled inland and upward, into the rich kitchens of the Mughal north, where it found its grandest role. Mughlai cookery prized nuts as thickeners and enrichers, and the mild, fatty, easily ground cashew was made for the part: soaked and blended to a paste, it gives body, sheen, and a faint sweetness to the great cream gravies of the korma and the shahi (royal) dishes, and it is the secret of the pale, opulent sauce of the cashew curry, kaju masala. Boiled with sugar and rolled wafer-thin, the same nut becomes kaju katli, the silver-leafed diamond-shaped fudge that is the most coveted of all the sweets of Diwali, and fried with salt and spice it is the masala kaju set out at every Indian celebration. The cashew, expensive and luxurious, became the mark of festive and wedding cooking across the subcontinent, scattered over biryani and pulao, ground into the gravies of the restaurant table, and pressed into the milk sweets of the confectioner. India, having received the tree at Goa, became the world's principal grower and sheller of the nut, and the country whose cooking leans on the cashew more than any other on earth.
Mozambique and the East African Coast — c. 1610 CE
On the same Portuguese tide that carried the cashew east to India, the tree crossed to the coast of East Africa, and nowhere did it take hold more completely than in Mozambique. The drought-proof cashew flourished along the hot, sandy littoral from Maputo to Nampula, and over the centuries it became both a food of the people and, under colonial rule, a pillar of the whole economy; for much of the twentieth century Mozambique was the largest cashew producer in the world, its nuts shelled in great quantity for export. The Mozambican kitchen wove the nut deep into its cooking. It is ground into matapa, the country's beloved stew of tender cassava leaves simmered with coconut milk and pounded cashews or groundnuts until rich and green; and it is the soul of Maputo's bolo polana, the dense, buttery cake of mashed potato and ground cashews that is the most famous sweet of the Mozambican capital. The cashew apple is pressed and fermented here too, into juice and a country wine. From Mozambique the taste for the cashew spread along the Swahili coast, and the nut became, as it had in Brazil and India, both a daily food and a thing of celebration.
Carried on along the maritime trade routes of monsoon Asia, the cashew reached Siam and the lands of mainland South-East Asia, where the tree found a warm and welcoming home, above all in the sandy south of the country around Phuket and Ranong. The Thais named the cashew apple mamuang himmaphan, the 'Himavanta mango', for its likeness to a mango (the two trees are close kin) and its air of belonging to the mythical forest of the Himavanta. In the Thai kitchen the nut came into its own in the stir-fry, and gave the world one of the most famous of all Thai dishes: gai pad med mamuang himmaphan, chicken stir-fried with whole roasted cashews, dried chillies, onion, and a glossy savoury sauce, the cashews fried until golden so that they keep their crunch against the tender chicken. It is a dish of the wok and the high heat, quick, sweet, salty, and gently fiery, and it has carried the taste of the Thai cashew to restaurant tables across the globe. From Siam the cashew spread on into the wider region, into southern China and the lands of Indochina, everywhere finding its way into the pan.
From mainland South-East Asia the cashew passed north into the warm south of China, into Guangdong and Hainan, carried on the busy maritime trade of the South China Sea, and the Cantonese kitchen took to the nut with enthusiasm. The Chinese named it yāoguǒ, the 'kidney nut' or 'waist nut', for its curved shape, and made of it one of the classic dishes of the stir-fry repertoire: yāoguǒ jīdīng, diced chicken stir-fried with cashews. Tender cubes of chicken are velveted smooth, then tossed at high heat with golden roasted cashews, diced vegetables, and a light, savoury sauce of soy and rice wine, the nut lending its rich crunch and gentle sweetness to the dish. Lighter and less fiery than its Thai cousin, the Cantonese cashew chicken became a staple of the Chinese restaurant the world over, and one of the dishes by which the cashew is best known in the West. Across southern China the nut entered other stir-fries and the festive table besides, naturalised completely into a cuisine that had never known it before the age of sail.
The cashew reached Vietnam along the same regional routes, and in the red basalt soils of the south, above all the province of Bình Phước, it found ground so perfectly suited to it that Vietnam would in time outstrip every other nation. From the late twentieth century, on the back of vast new plantations and an enormous shelling industry, Vietnam rose to become the world's foremost processor and exporter of cashews, shelling not only its own great crop but much of the raw nut grown in West Africa besides. The nut sank deep into the Vietnamese table, and its most beloved everyday form is hạt điều rang muối, salt-roasted cashews: the kernels, often left in their thin reddish skins, roasted with salt and sometimes chilli and lime leaf until fragrant and crisp, sold by the bag everywhere and pressed on every visitor to Bình Phước as the pride of the region. The cashew also enters the Vietnamese stir-fry and the festive snack tray, but it is as the simple, addictive salt-roasted nut that Vietnam, the world's great sheller of cashews, knows it best.
The cashew came to the American table first as a snack, carried from India by sea through the Suez and across the Atlantic to the north-eastern ports, the roasted, salted kernel that, once the Indian shelling industry made it affordable in the early twentieth century, became one of the most popular nuts in the United States, scattered through mixed nuts and brittles and tinned by the million. But its most remarkable American turn came at the start of the present century, on the West Coast and in the rising plant-based movement, when cooks discovered that the cashew's mildness and high fat made it the ideal dairy substitute. Soaked until soft and blended with water, the nut yields a smooth, neutral, luxuriously rich cream that can be cultured into cheese, churned into ice cream, whipped into sauces, and poured wherever cream once went, with none of the strong flavour that defeats other nuts. Cashew cream and cashew cheese became foundations of the vegan kitchen, and from California the technique spread across the Western world, giving the ancient Brazilian nut a wholly new life as the cornerstone of dairy-free cooking. It was the latest chapter in a long story of reinvention: the apple in Brazil, the gravy thickener in India, the stir-fry nut in Asia, and now the cream of the plant-based table in the West.
To explore — select an ingredient below · click any location dot on the map for recipes and stories · browse the information panel on the right · trace the full journey on the timeline.
Journey Point Map Key
Ingredient originTrade or transit route
Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control
c. 1905 CEThe North-eastern United States
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8 of 8 stops
1905 CE
Pre-Columbian1620 CE1700 CE1905 CE
Ingredient originBecame a culinary stapleTrade or transit routeColonial / trade control
Cashew
Anacardium occidentale
NutsAnacardiaceae
🌍Origin
The coastal lowlands and cerrado of north-eastern Brazil, the homeland of the wild and cultivated cashew tree and of the Tupi peoples who first prized its fruit — Gathered and cultivated by the Tupi of north-eastern Brazil long before European contact; carried across the world by the Portuguese from the sixteenth century
🌱Domestication
The cashew is one plant that gives two utterly different foods, and a great deal of confusion follows from it. Anacardium occidentale belongs to the Anacardiaceae, the family of the mango, the pistachio, the sumac, and, less happily, the poison ivy, and it shares with its poisonous cousins a caustic oil that shapes its whole story. What the tree bears is, first, a swollen, fleshy, pear-shaped 'apple', brilliant red or yellow, juicy, sweet, and astringent: this is the cashew apple, not a fruit at all but a hugely enlarged flower-stalk, the peduncle. Hanging from its lower end is the true fruit, a hard, kidney-shaped, grey-green drupe, and inside that, protected by a double shell, lies the single seed the world knows as the cashew nut.
The nut is never sold in its shell, and for good reason. Between the shell's two walls runs cashew nut shell liquid, a dark, blistering oil rich in anacardic acid and the same urushiol that makes poison ivy so feared; it raises welts on bare skin and gives off acrid, irritating fumes when burned. The nut must therefore be roasted and laboriously hand-shelled before it can be eaten, which is why, even now, the cashew is one of the most labour-intensive of all the world's nuts and why its processing settled in lands of cheap and skilled hand labour. Unusually amongst the great food plants, the cashew is a single species with a single origin and no clutch of separate domestications: its variety lies not in different kinds of plant but in the two quite different harvests, the perishable apple and the travelling nut, that one tree provides.
⛵Global Voyage
The cashew is a Brazilian native that conquered the tropics, and it did so almost entirely in the holds of Portuguese ships. The Tupi of north-eastern Brazil had long valued the cashew, above all the apple, which they ate fresh and fermented into a drink, and the nut, which they roasted; but it was the perishability of the apple and the portability of the seed that decided the plant's future. When the Portuguese reached Brazil they took an interest in the hardy, drought-proof tree, and from about the 1560s they carried it east, planting it first on their Indian territory at Goa, where it was valued at the outset less for food than for binding the crumbling laterite slopes of the coast against erosion. From Goa the cashew spread down the Konkan and Malabar coasts and inland, and India in time became the heart of the world's cashew trade, both the great grower and the great sheller of the nut.
On the same Portuguese tide the cashew crossed to East Africa, taking hold above all in Mozambique, where it became at once a food and, for centuries, a mainstay of the colonial economy; Mozambique was for a long time the largest cashew producer on earth. Carried on along the maritime trade routes of monsoon Asia, the tree reached Siam, the south of China, and the lands of mainland South-East Asia, where the nut entered the wok; in the twentieth century Vietnam rose to become the world's foremost processor of cashews, and West Africa, from Côte d'Ivoire to Guinea-Bissau, the foremost grower of the raw nut. Meanwhile the shelled kernel, mild, rich, and crescent-shaped, travelled everywhere as a luxury snack and, at the turn of the present century, found a wholly new vocation in the Western plant-based kitchen, blended into the creams and cheeses of vegan cooking. From a single tree on the north-eastern Brazilian shore, the cashew had become a crop of every tropical coast and a nut on every continent's table.
🍽Modern Culinary Role
The cashew leads two lives. As a nut it is global: the buttery, kidney-shaped kernel is eaten roasted and salted by the handful from Mumbai to Manhattan, and it runs deep through the cooking of the lands that adopted it. India, the greatest consumer of all, grinds it into the silky gravies of the Mughlai korma and the festive cashew curry, and boils it with sugar into kaju katli, the wafer-thin, silver-leafed diamond that is the most prized of all Diwali sweets. The wok kitchens of Thailand and southern China made the stir-fry of chicken and cashews, gai pad med mamuang and yaoguo jiding, into dishes famous the world over, and Vietnam, now the planet's leading sheller of the nut, turns out the salt-roasted cashews, hat dieu rang muoi, that are its own beloved snack. In Mozambique the nut is ground into matapa, the great stew of cassava leaves and coconut, and baked into Maputo's bolo polana.
The cashew apple, by contrast, has stayed close to home, for it bruises and ferments within a day of picking and cannot travel as the nut does. In its Brazilian birthplace it is pressed for the ubiquitous caju juice and clarified into cajuína, the amber, heritage-listed drink of the north-east; in Goa it is distilled into feni, the fierce country spirit that is the Goan liquor above all others. And in the twenty-first century the cashew has been reinvented yet again, this time in the West, where its mildness and high fat let it be soaked and blended into a smooth cream that has become the foundation of vegan cooking, standing in for dairy in everything from cheese to ice cream. Grown across the tropics, processed in Asia, and prized on every table, the cashew is one of the most thoroughly globalised of all the foods the New World gave the Old.
