Hazelnuts and the cure for baldness

Hazelnuts. Whoops, I mean "filberts," according to the Oregon Hazelnut Marketing Board (why don't they call themselves the Oregon Filbert Marketing board if it's such a big deal?) Since moving here to Oregon 11 years ago, I have really grown to like and appreciate them. Tonight I just finished eating them in some pasta. Hazelnuts are rich in protein and unsaturated fat, contain lots of thiamine, B vitamins, and fiber. They are crunchy. And their shells make a good subject for the theme "texture" which is the assignment for the Friday shoot-out this week. I was visiting a friend and noticed they were using hazelnut shells to landscape the yard, so I took a picture (texture!!):


The Greek physician Dioscorides wrote about hazelnuts almost 2,000 years ago, and his 5-volume tome on herbal science, De Materia Medica, stayed in circulation well into the 1400's. That is a loooong time, especially when you consider books had to be hand-copied. Boy, that book better be worth it.

So, according to Dioscorides, here are the properties of the hazelnut:

"It cures chronic coughing if pounded filbert is eaten with honey. Cooked filbert mixed with black pepper cures the cold. If the ointment produced by mashing burnt filbert shells in suet is smeared on the head where hair does not grow due to normal baldness or to some disease, hair will come again."


"Hair will come again?" So, I thought: I bet he was vain enough to try this on himself...I wonder if there is a picture of him somewhere. Let's see. There is, and it's a drawing. It's public domain. And nobody knows who drew it. How convenient: you can draw your own conclusions! Indeed, he has lots of lovely, wavy hair because:

a. the artist imagined it
b. he had lots of lovely wavy hair and wrote about it
c. he hadn't yet heard about genetics and didn't know baldness had skipped a generation
d. Mashing burnt filbert shells, mixing them with suet, and smearing them on your head works wonders.

Dioscorides De Materia Medica, Arabic, 12th-13th century.

I think I am going to resist making further fun of Dioscorides (who is not here to defend himself) because of the sheer beauty of his books, handwritten and illustrated hundreds of years after his death. And who knows? Maybe he had something there with the hazelnut shells. I think I have some suet around somewhere, maybe in the bird feeder, and I know a lawn where they would never miss a few handfuls of shells. I bet I could make a fortune off of this stuff.

De Materia Medica, Byzantine, 15th century

Arabic: Dioscorides Book of Simple Drugs, 1334

If you are interested, go here for a heap of interesting hazelnut recipes.