Nuts!

In a recent piece, I wondered whatever became of India nuts, those tiny nuts we bit open to get at a kernel that wasn't worth the work. I can hear it now: the relentless cracking sounds around me in the cheap back-balcony seats at the Loews 83d Street movie house.

''They were known as Indian nuts,'' reports Joe Pollack of St. Louis, ''or, by their correct name of pinon nuts,'' or pine nuts, from the Southwestern pinyon tree. Other correspondents, misty-eyed at the recollection, suggest that the term came from Native Americans, or Indians, who gathered and sold the nuts in the Southwestern United States. That may have influenced the spelling of the term, but I think that Indian in this phrase is a corruption of pinyon. At any rate, it's not ''India'' nuts; I had broken the phrase by ear, mistakenly losing an n, much as I once did with Guy Lombardo, thinking the band leader's first name was Guylom.

yeah but... I've never seen a pine nut in the shell. LOVE THEM, but I can't imagine having to shell 'em.

Probaby hard to research small round nuts on google..