A typical dish comprises large prawns mixed with ginkgo nuts, pieces of chicken and mushrooms cooked on hot cooking salt in a earthenware casserole. A hard shelled nut with an oval or round kernel that is produced by one of several species of hazel tree. Harvested in August and September, the nuts can be eaten fresh but are usually dried. They also contain sulphur, phosphorus, calcium, potassium and nicotinic acid. The common hickory nut has an extremely hard shell.
Hickory nuts have an excellent rich flavour with a buttery quality due to their high fat content.
They are a usually sold unshelled. Hickory nuts can be used in a variety of baked goods and in almost any recipe as a substitute for pecans. The seeds are extensively used as a condiment by the natives of Western and Central tropical Africa, also by the negroes of the West Indies and Brazil, who introduced the trees to these countries. In Western Africa these trees are usually found growing near the sea-coast, and a big trade is carried on with the nuts by the natives of the interior Cola being eaten by them as far as Fezzan and Tripoli. The fruit of an Australian free.