It's not such a 'lousy' nut after all

The perennial pignut is a culinary delight, says John Wright, although acquiring one can be a rather tedious task in truth

- John Wright

The humble pignut, also known as the kippernut, cipernut, arnut, jarnut, hawknut, earth chestnut, groundnut, earthnut and a dozen more names, is tiny. The largest I have seen was barely an inch in diameter, a prized monster of its clan.

Still, the plant that bears it, also known as the pignut, Conopodium majus, seems to do very well to produce anything approaching that size, as it is itself tiny for a member of the carrot family, with sparse, wispy leaves. Diminutive size has not stopped people from collecting them over the centuries, as they are both nutritious and of excellent flavour.

It once bore the intentionally off-putting name ‘lousy pignut’. This was evidently used by mothers to stop their children from gathering them thanks to possible confusion with the poisonous roots of wild plants. This is attested by numerous newspaper reports of pignut-related tragedies, mostly due to the mistaken ingestion of hemlock water-dropwort roots. Yes, the ‘nuts’ are roots, very much as a carrot is a root — a storage root. Pignuts are likely to be the otherwise inexplicable ‘nuts in May’.

Treasure

It is not just small boys who delight in finding pignuts — badgers love them too. This has caused much gnashing of teeth among naturalists who tend herb-rich grasslands, as badgers will dig furiously, uprooting any number of valuable herbaceous plants in their efforts to unearth their treasure.

Such behaviour, however, is ultimately of benefit, as it makes available fresh soil where other plants may establish, some of which may have been ‘missing’ from that habitat. I have seen grassland disturbed in this way on a nature reserve in my own Dorset parish.