Corylus avellana (common hazel, the European hazelnut and cobnut) · Corylus maxima (the filbert) · Corylus colurna (Turkish tree hazel) · Corylus americana and C. cornuta (American and beaked hazelnuts) · Corylus heterophylla (Asian or Siberian hazel)
Origin: Multiple wild origins across the temperate Northern Hemisphere: the common hazel (Corylus avellana) of Europe and Anatolia; the filbert (C. maxima) and Turkish hazel (C. colurna) of the Black Sea and the Balkans; the American hazels (C. americana and C. cornuta) of North America; and the Asian hazel (C. heterophylla) of Northeast China and Siberia
The hazelnut is one of the oldest wild foods of the temperate world, and one of the very first that human beings gathered, roasted, and stored in bulk. It is the fruit of the hazel, a shrub or small tree of the birch family, and unlike the almond or the walnut it is a true nut in the botanical sense: a single hard-shelled seed that does not split to release its kernel, cradled in a leafy green husk (the involucre) that gives the filbert and the cobnut their distinctive ragged collar. The genus Corylus is spread right across the Northern Hemisphere, and it was taken up not once but in several places at once, so that the hazelnut, like the raspberry and the blackberry, has no single homeland but a scattering of them.
The dominant nut of the kitchen and of world commerce is the common hazel, Corylus avellana, native across the whole of Europe and into Anatolia and the Caucasus; it is joined in cultivation by the filbert, Corylus maxima, whose longer nut is wholly enclosed by a husk longer than itself, and by the great Turkish tree hazel, Corylus colurna, valued as a timber and as the hardy rootstock upon which orchard hazels are grown. In North America the woodland nations gathered their own species, the American hazel Corylus americana and the beaked hazel Corylus cornuta, and in the forests of Northeast China and Siberia grew a fourth lineage, Corylus heterophylla, the Asian hazel, one of the 'four famous nuts' of the Chinese table. These separate wild stocks are the reason the hazelnut belongs to Europe, Anatolia, East Asia, and North America all at once.
What sets the hazelnut apart from almost every other orchard fruit is the sheer antiquity and scale of its wild gathering. Long before any tree was planted in a row, the peoples of Mesolithic Europe were harvesting hazelnuts by the tonne: at Staosnaig on the Scottish island of Colonsay, archaeologists found a great roasting pit filled with the charred shells of hundreds of thousands of hazelnuts, processed in a single intensive season around 7000 BCE, and at Star Carr in Yorkshire and across the whole of post-glacial northern Europe the hazelnut was a staple of the forager's autumn, roasted to preserve it and stored against the winter. True cultivation came late and gradually: the classical world prized the fine, large nuts of Pontus and of Avella above the wild fruit of the woods, and it is from these cultivated stocks, improved over two thousand years, that the orchards of Turkey, Italy, and the wider world descend.
For most of its history the hazelnut did not travel, because the hazel grew wild across the whole temperate breadth of the Northern Hemisphere and every region gathered the nut at its own door; its story is less one of migration than of the slow refinement of a fruit that was already everywhere. The decisive early distinction was one of quality, not of place. The classical Mediterranean drew the finest nuts from two cultivated sources, and both left their names on the fruit. From the southern shore of the Black Sea, the ancient land of Pontus, came the large, sweet nut the Greeks called the 'Pontic nut' and the 'Herakleotic nut', after the city of Heraclea Pontica; Theophrastus described it in the fourth century BCE, and it passed westward into Greece and then to Rome. In Campania, at the town of Avella, the Romans grew the nut they called nux avellana, the Avellan nut, and it is this name, not the Greek one, that the botanists made permanent in Corylus avellana and that survives in the Italian avellana and the Spanish avellana to this day.
Through the Middle Ages and the early modern centuries the hazelnut spread as a cultivated tree across the kitchen gardens and orchards of Europe, each country making its own of it. In Kent the English raised the cobnut and the filbert as an orchard crop, eaten fresh and green in the autumn; in Catalonia the nut became the backbone of the pounded sauces of the table; in the German-speaking lands and in Austria it filled the great nut tortes of the Kaffeehaus; and in France it was ground with sugar into the praline paste that became one of the foundations of the pâtisserie. The most consequential of all these transformations came in Piedmont, where in the early nineteenth century, with cocoa made scarce and dear by the Napoleonic blockade of the Continent, the confectioners of Turin stretched their chocolate with the abundant local hazelnut of the Langhe hills and created gianduja, the hazelnut-and-chocolate paste that would, a century and a half later, conquer the world as Nutella.
The hazelnut's true crossing of the oceans is recent and largely a matter of the cultivated European nut following European people. In the eighteen-seventies the French nurseryman Felix Gillet carried European filbert varieties to the Pacific coast of North America, and in the cool, damp Willamette Valley of Oregon they found a second home so perfect that Oregon now grows very nearly the whole of the United States crop. Yet all of this is dwarfed by the modern dominance of the nut's oldest cradle: the Black Sea coast of Turkey, the Pontus of the ancients, today produces the overwhelming majority of the world's hazelnuts, the terraced groves of Giresun, Ordu, and Trabzon supplying the great chocolate and confectionery industries of Europe with the raw material of their pralines and their gianduja. From a wild nut of the forager's autumn, gathered on four continents, the hazelnut has become one of the most heavily traded and industrially important of all the tree nuts.
The hazelnut today is, above all other things, the nut of the confectioner and the chocolatier. Although it is eaten whole and roasted, and pressed for a fragrant oil, the overwhelming bulk of the world crop is destined for the chocolate and confectionery trade, which absorbs the great majority of the harvest: a single manufacturer of chocolate-hazelnut spread is reckoned to consume a quarter of all the hazelnuts grown on earth. The nut's affinity for chocolate, discovered in the gianduja of Napoleonic Turin, has made it the most industrially valuable of the tree nuts after the almond, and the price of a jar of spread in a European supermarket is tied directly to the fortunes of the harvest on the Black Sea coast.
Production is extraordinarily concentrated. Turkey alone grows the majority of the world's hazelnuts, its crop drawn from the steep, terraced groves that run along the whole Black Sea littoral from Ordu and Giresun to Trabzon, the ancient Pontus; Italy is the second grower, its finest culinary nut the Tonda Gentile of the Piedmontese Langhe and the Tonda di Giffoni of Campania; and the United States, meaning very nearly Oregon alone, is third. Beyond these, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and, increasingly, Chile have become significant suppliers to the same insatiable confectionery market. The cultivated nut is overwhelmingly the European hazel, Corylus avellana, in a range of named varieties; the American species survive chiefly in the breeding of blight-resistant hybrids for the North American climate, and the Asian hazel, Corylus heterophylla, is grown and gathered as a roasted snack across Northeast China.
Around this industrial nut there survives an unusually rich body of regional tradition. The hazelnut is the gianduja, the Nutella, the torta di nocciole, and the baci di dama of Piedmont; the Haselnusstorte and the Nusskipferl of the Austrian coffee house; the praliné, the Paris-Brest, and the dacquoise of the French pastry kitchen; the romesco of Catalonia, in which the pounded nut thickens and enriches a sauce of dried peppers and tomato; the fındık baklavası and the fındık helvası of the Turkish Black Sea coast; the fresh cobnut of the Kentish autumn; and the roasted hazelnut torte and the hazelnut-crusted salmon of Oregon. From the Mesolithic roasting pits of Colonsay to the chocolate factories of Alba, the hazelnut has been, for nine thousand years, one of the most useful and best-loved nuts of the temperate world.
Historical Journey of Hazelnut
Mesolithic Europe (Colonsay & Star Carr) — c. 7000 BCE
The common hazel, Corylus avellana, spread across the whole of temperate Europe as the ice retreated, one of the first trees to recolonise the warming land, and it gave the hunter-gatherers of the Mesolithic one of their most important foods. The evidence of that harvest is extraordinary. On the small Scottish island of Colonsay, at Staosnaig, archaeologists uncovered a large pit packed with the charred shells of hundreds of thousands of hazelnuts, roasted in a single intensive season around 7000 BCE, proof that whole communities gathered and processed the nut on an industrial scale eight thousand years before the first orchard; at Star Carr in Yorkshire and across the forests of post-glacial northern Europe the same picture repeats, the hazelnut roasted to preserve it and stored against the winter as a staple of the forager's year. So dominant was the tree in the early post-glacial north that palynologists speak of a 'hazel maximum', a period around nine thousand years ago when hazel pollen overwhelms the record from Ireland to southern Scandinavia; the shell-strewn middens of the Danish Mesolithic, at Ertebølle and before it, record the same intensive gathering along the Baltic and North Sea shores that Colonsay records in the west. This wild European hazel is the ancestral stock from which every cobnut, filbert, and cultivated hazel of Europe would later be drawn, and the deep antiquity of its gathering, long predating any cereal or any planted tree, makes it one of the oldest gathered staples in the whole of the human record. From this vast wild population the nut passed, over millennia, into the kitchen gardens and orchards of Britain, France, Iberia, Central Europe, and the Italian peninsula, whilst in the cool Nordic north, where the hazel is native to the southern reaches of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, it remained above all a gathered wild nut, the imported almond becoming the baking nut of the Scandinavian table.
Pontus, the Black Sea Coast of Anatolia — c. 6000 BCE
The southern shore of the Black Sea, the ancient land of Pontus, is at once one of the wild cradles of the hazel and the region that has, for three thousand years and again today, defined the nut for the whole world. Here the common hazel Corylus avellana and the great tree hazel Corylus colurna grow wild on the steep, wet slopes that fall to the sea, and here the finest cultivated nuts of antiquity were raised: the Greeks called them the 'Pontic nut' and the 'Herakleotic nut', after the colony of Heraclea Pontica, and Theophrastus praised them in the fourth century BCE. The name of the region is fossilised in the fruit itself, for the Greek karyon pontikon passed through the Arabic bunduq to become the modern Turkish fındık, the everyday word for the hazelnut. That ancient pre-eminence has become, in the modern age, an outright dominance: the terraced groves of Ordu, Giresun, and Trabzon supply the majority of all the hazelnuts grown on earth, and it is from this coast that the great chocolate and confectionery houses of Europe draw the raw material of their pralines and their gianduja. The same hazelnut belt runs on eastward around the Black Sea into the Caucasus, where Georgia, and above all the groves of Samegrelo, and Azerbaijan, in the Zaqatala foothills, have become, after Turkey and Italy, amongst the largest producers and exporters in the world. Yet in the Caucasus the nut is grown far more than it is cooked, for the defining nut of the Georgian and Armenian kitchen is the walnut, not the hazelnut, and the Caucasian crop flows chiefly into the same export trade rather than into a flagship dish of its own. It is on the Turkish shore that the nut is both grown and eaten: the Black Sea kitchen makes it its own in the fındık baklavası, the hazelnut baklava of Giresun; in the fındık helvası, the hazelnut halva of the region; and in the fındık ezmesi, the dense hazelnut marzipan that is the coast's own answer to what to do with its harvest, and the classic edible souvenir of a journey there. In all of them the nut is eaten plain and undisguised, without the chocolate that dominates it elsewhere, so that the fruit which feeds the world's confectionery is also the everyday sweet of its own homeland.
The Eastern Woodlands & Great Lakes, North America — c. 6000 BCE
North America raised its own hazels, wholly separate from those of the Old World: the American hazel, Corylus americana, a shrubby nut-bearer of the eastern woodlands and the prairie edge, and the beaked hazel, Corylus cornuta, named for the long, bristly beak that sheaths its nut, growing from the Great Lakes to the Pacific slope. For thousands of years the Indigenous nations of the continent, amongst them the Ojibwe, the Haudenosaunee, and the peoples of the western Great Lakes, gathered these native hazelnuts as a valued wild food, eaten fresh, dried and pounded for the winter store, and simmered into soups and cornmeal dishes. The American nuts are smaller and harder-shelled than the European, and they were never brought into large-scale cultivation in the way of the Old World hazel; yet they carry a hardiness and a disease-resistance that modern breeders of the Upper Midwest now prize, crossing them with the European nut to build a cold-hardy hybrid hazel for a new northern orchard crop. It was to this continent, and above all to the Pacific Northwest, that the cultivated European filbert would later be carried, to meet the native hazel on its own ground.
Northeast China & the Forests of Siberia — c. 4000 BCE
In the mixed forests of Northeast China, Manchuria, and Siberia grows a third great hazel lineage, wholly separate from those of Europe and America: the Asian hazel, Corylus heterophylla, a hardy, small-nutted shrub of the cold continental woods, joined by the Chinese tree hazel Corylus chinensis. Gathered wild across the northeastern provinces since prehistory, the nut, the zhēnzi, became and remains one of the 'four famous nuts' of the Chinese table, ranked with the chestnut, the walnut, and the ginkgo, and it is eaten above all as a roasted snack, cracked from its shell by the handful and, in the northeastern manner, roasted with salt and spice. The Asian hazel is smaller and thicker-shelled than the European nut, but it is hardy where the European tree is tender, and it has become the parent, crossed with Corylus avellana, of the new hybrid 'ping' hazels now planted across northern China to feed the country's vast and growing appetite for the nut and for the chocolate that is made with it. In the northeastern kitchen the roasted zhēnzi is the nut of the winter fireside and the New Year table, the everyday hazelnut of East Asia.
Avella & Campania, Roman Italy — c. 100 BCE
The hazelnut that the botanists would name for all time was the nut of Campania, and above all of the town of Avella, the Roman Abella, in the hills east of Naples. This was Italy's own native hazel, the very same Corylus avellana that had spread wild the length of temperate Europe after the ice, here taken into cultivation and improved on the warm Campanian slopes; the Romans grew it with care and prized it above the wild fruit of the woods. They knew and imported, too, the even more celebrated cultivated nut of Pontus on the Black Sea, and Pliny the Elder set the Avellan and the Pontic nut side by side as the best of all hazels; yet it is Avella, the Italian town and not the Anatolian coast, whose name the naturalists made permanent in Corylus avellana and in the Italian and Spanish word for the nut, avellana. That the same species was native both to Italy and to Pontus, and prized in cultivation in both, is why its two most famous ancient nuts, the Avellan and the Pontic, were rivals rather than one the parent of the other. The Romans strewed hazelnuts at weddings as a charm of fertility and good fortune, and they ground and pounded them into the sweetmeats of the table. That ancient Campanian tradition is a living one: the hills around Avellino still grow one of the finest culinary hazelnuts in the world, the Tonda di Giffoni, and the nut runs deep through the sweets of the southern Italian table. Its grandest form is the torrone, the honey-and-egg-white nougat dense with toasted nuts that the town of Benevento in Campania has made its own, set out for the feast of the dead and for Christmas across the whole Italian south.
Kent & the Orchards of England — c. 1200 CE
The hazel is one of the most deeply rooted of all trees in the British landscape and imagination, coppiced since the Neolithic for its straight, supple rods, woven into wattle and hurdle and thatching spar, and cut for the diviner's forked stick; its nuts were gathered wild every autumn in the ritual of 'going a-nutting'. From the wild hazel of the woods the English raised an orchard nut of their own, the cobnut, the short, round, thick-shelled cultivated hazel that became the speciality of Kent, where whole plantations, the 'plats', were laid out for it in the Weald and along the Medway. The Kentish cobnut is a fruit of the early autumn, and it is eaten at its best fresh and green, the milky young kernel prised from its ragged leafy husk, as well as ripened and dried for the winter and for Christmas. In the kitchen the cobnut and the filbert went into stuffings, into the nut-brown ale and the harvest table, and above all into the cakes of the English autumn, where the toasted, ground nut gives a moist, fragrant crumb; the Kentish cobnut cake, rich with the local nut, is the classic expression of the fruit. Fresh Kentish cobnuts remain a cherished seasonal delicacy, protected and prized, a taste of the English orchard in September.
Reus & Catalonia, Spain — c. 1500 CE
In Catalonia the hazelnut, the avellana, is not a sweetmeat but the savoury heart of the regional kitchen, and the country around Reus and Tarragona has grown it as a serious crop for centuries, the town of Reus becoming one of the great hazelnut markets of the Mediterranean. The Catalan cook pounds the toasted nut into the two great foundations of the regional cuisine: the picada, the paste of nuts, fried bread, garlic, and parsley crushed in the mortar and stirred into a stew at the last moment to thicken and perfume it, and, most famous of all, the romesco, the deep, brick-red sauce of pounded hazelnuts and almonds, dried ñora peppers, roasted tomato, garlic, and olive oil that is the sauce of the Catalan table. Romesco dresses grilled fish and rabbit, and above all it is the sauce for the calçotada, the great late-winter feast of charred spring onions eaten with the fingers and dragged through a bowl of the nut-thick sauce. In Catalonia the hazelnut is a savoury staple in the fullest sense, the ingredient that gives the region's cooking its body and its unmistakable character.
Paris & the French Pâtisserie — c. 1650 CE
France took the hazelnut into the very foundations of its pastry kitchen, and it did so above all through the medium of the praline. In the seventeenth century the confectioner of the Maréchal du Plessis-Praslin gave his master's name to the praline, nuts cooked in caramelised sugar; ground to a paste, that caramelised nut became the praliné, and the classic praliné of the French pâtisserie is made of hazelnuts and almonds together, the hazelnut lending it its deep, roasted perfume. From this paste the French built some of their most celebrated sweets. The Paris-Brest, a ring of choux pastry split and filled with a praline-flavoured mousseline cream, was created around 1910 in honour of the Paris-to-Brest bicycle race, its very shape a bicycle wheel, and it is perhaps the supreme expression of the hazelnut in French pâtisserie. Beside it stands the dacquoise, the crisp, chewy disc of hazelnut-and-almond meringue layered with buttercream that takes its name from the town of Dax in the southwest. Through the praliné, the Paris-Brest, the dacquoise, and the countless gâteaux and entremets built upon them, the ground, caramelised hazelnut became one of the indispensable flavours of the French sweet kitchen, and French nurserymen would carry the cultivated nut itself across the Atlantic to the New World.
Vienna & the Austrian Coffee House — c. 1700 CE
In Austria and the German-speaking lands the hazelnut, the Haselnuss, became one of the defining flavours of the Kaffeehaus and the home baking table, where ground nuts, rather than flour, give the great tortes their dense, moist, and fragrant crumb. The Viennese pastry tradition, the richest in Europe, raised the hazelnut into the Haselnusstorte, a many-layered cake of ground toasted hazelnuts bound with butter, sugar, and egg and filled and cloaked in hazelnut or chocolate buttercream, one of the classic tortes of the coffee house served in a slice beside a Melange. The nut runs through the whole repertoire of Austrian and German baking: the Nusskipferl, the little hazelnut crescents of the Christmas plate; the Nussecken, the nut-topped triangles; the hazelnut Lebkuchen and the Linzer-style pastries; and the hazelnut macaroon, the Haselnussmakrone. In a baking culture that prizes ground nuts above almost any other ingredient, the hazelnut, toasted to bring out its perfume, is second only to the almond, and in many of the most beloved cakes and biscuits of the Austrian year it is the leading flavour of all.
The Langhe & Turin, Piedmont — c. 1806 CE
Piedmont is the spiritual home of the hazelnut in the kitchen, for it was here, in the hills of the Langhe, that the finest culinary hazelnut of all was raised, the Tonda Gentile delle Langhe, and here that the nut was married to chocolate in the most consequential confection in its history. When Napoleon's Continental Blockade cut off the supply of cocoa in the early nineteenth century and made chocolate scarce and dear, the confectioners of Turin stretched their precious chocolate by working in a paste of the abundant local hazelnut, and so created gianduja, the smooth, deep hazelnut-and-chocolate paste moulded into the little ingot-shaped gianduiotto. From that wartime economy grew an entire industry: in the town of Alba, after the Second World War, Pietro Ferrero turned the same principle into a spreadable hazelnut-chocolate cream, the ancestor of Nutella, and built upon it one of the largest confectionery companies on earth. What Ferrero changed was the form and the price rather than the confection itself, for alongside the industrial history the artisanal one ran on unbroken: the confectioners and home cooks of Piedmont still make crema gianduja, the spreadable hazelnut chocolate, in the old proportions of far more nut and far less sugar. Beyond the chocolate, the Piedmontese kitchen makes the pure nut into the torta di nocciole, the moist, dense hazelnut cake of the Langhe eaten with a glass of Moscato, and into the baci di dama, the 'ladies' kisses' of two little domed hazelnut biscuits joined with a dab of chocolate. In Piedmont the hazelnut is not one ingredient amongst many but the defining nut of a whole regional identity.
The Willamette Valley, Oregon — c. 1905 CE
The cultivated European hazelnut crossed the Atlantic with European people and found, in the cool, damp, maritime climate of the Willamette Valley of Oregon, a second home so perfect that Oregon now grows very nearly the entire hazelnut crop of the United States. The nut was brought to the American West by the French nurseryman Felix Gillet, who imported European filbert varieties to the Pacific coast in the eighteen-seventies, and the first commercial orchards were planted around the turn of the twentieth century; the 'Barcelona' variety and its successors took to the valley's mild, wet winters and long, temperate summers, and the industry grew until the hazelnut became the official state nut of Oregon. Here the imported European nut met the continent's own native hazel, the beaked Corylus cornuta, and modern Oregon breeders have drawn on that native stock to raise the blight-resistant varieties that now carry the crop. Oregon's cooks made the roasted local nut their own, in the flourless hazelnut torte, in cookies and brittle, and, most distinctively, in the hazelnut-crusted salmon that brings together the two great foods of the Pacific Northwest, the toasted nut forming a fragrant crust on the region's iconic fish.
