A nutcracker is a tool designed to open nuts by cracking their shells. There are many designs, including levers, screws, and ratchets. The lever version is also used for cracking lobster and crab shells.
A decorative version, a nutcracker doll, portrays a person whose mouth forms the jaws of the nutcracker.
Nuts were historically opened using a hammer and anvil, often made of stone. [1] Some nuts such as walnuts can also be opened by hand, by holding the nut in the palm of the hand and applying pressure with the other palm or thumb, or using another nut. [2]
Manufacturers produce modern functional nutcrackers usually somewhat resembling pliers, but with the pivot point at the end beyond the nut, rather than in the middle. These are also used for cracking the shells of crab and lobster to make the meat inside available for eating. Hinged lever nutcrackers, often called a "pair of nutcrackers", may date back to Ancient Greece. [1] By the 14th century in Europe, nutcrackers were documented in England, including in the Canterbury Tales , and in France. [1] The lever design may derive from blacksmiths' pincers. Materials included metals such as silver, cast-iron and bronze, [3] and wood including boxwood, especially those from France and Italy. [1] More rarely, porcelain was used. [3] Many of the wooden carved nutcrackers were in the form of people and animals. [1]
During the Victorian era, fruit and nuts were presented at dinner and ornate and often silver-plated nutcrackers were produced to accompany them on the dinner table. [1] Nuts have long been a popular choice for desserts, particularly throughout Europe. The nutcrackers were placed on dining tables to serve as a fun and entertaining center of conversation while diners awaited their final course. At one time, nutcrackers were actually made of metals such as brass, and it was not until the 1800s in Germany that the popularity of wooden ones began to spread. [4]
The late 19th century saw two shifts in nutcracker production: the rise in figurative and decorative designs, particularly from the Alps where they were sold as souvenirs, and a switch to industrial manufacture, including availability in mail-order catalogues, rather than artisan production. [1] After the 1960s, the availability of pre-shelled nuts led to a decline in ownership of nutcrackers and a fall in the tradition of nuts being put in children's Christmas stockings. [1]
In the 17th century, screw nutcrackers were introduced that applied more gradual pressure to the shell, some like a vise. [1] The spring-jointed nutcracker was patented by Henry Quackenbush in 1913. [5] A ratchet design, similar to a car jack, that gradually increases pressure on the shell to avoid damaging the kernel inside is used by the Crackerjack, patented in 1947 by Cuthbert Leslie Rimes of Morley, Leeds and exhibited at the Festival of Britain. [6] [7] [8] [9] Unshelled nuts are still popular in China, where a key device is inserted into the crack in walnuts, pecans, and macadamias and twisted to open the shell. [10]
Screw nutcrackers are still commonly used to crack macadamia nuts, [11] since their shell is too hard to be cracked with an ordinary nutcracker. [12]
A crab cracker (also known as a lobster cracker or crab claw cracker) is a specialized food utensil, similar in construction (and sometimes appearance) to certain types of nutcrackers, used to crack the hard shells of crabs and lobsters by pulling the two handles together to access the flesh inside, while preparing or eating them.
Nutcrackers in the form of wood carvings of a soldier, knight, king, or other profession have existed since at least the 15th century. Figurative nutcrackers are a good luck symbol in Germany, and a folktale recounts that a puppet-maker won a nutcracking challenge by creating a doll with a mouth for a lever to crack the nuts. [3] These nutcrackers portray a person with a large mouth which the operator opens by lifting a lever in the back of the figurine. Originally one could insert a nut in the big-toothed mouth, press down and thereby crack the nut. Modern nutcrackers in this style serve mostly for decoration, mainly at Christmas time, a season of which they have long been a traditional symbol. [13] Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker , based on a story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, derives its name from this festive holiday decoration.
The carving of nutcrackers—as well as of religious figures and of cribs —developed as a cottage industry in forested rural areas of Germany. The most famous nutcracker carvings come from Sonneberg in Thuringia (also a center of dollmaking) and Seiffen, as part of the industry of wooden toymaking in the Ore Mountains. Wood-carving usually provided the only income for the people living there. Today the travel industry supplements their income by bringing visitors to the remote areas. Carvings by famous names like Junghanel, Klaus Mertens, Karl, Olaf Kolbe, Petersen, Christian Ulbricht and especially the Steinbach nutcrackers have become collectors' items.
Decorative nutcrackers became popular in the United States after the Second World War, following the first US production of The Nutcracker ballet in 1940 and the exposure of US soldiers to the dolls during the war. [14] In the United States, few of the decorative nutcrackers are now functional, though expensive working designs are still available. [14] Many of the woodworkers in Germany were in Erzgebirge, in the Soviet zone after the end of the war, and they mass-produced poorly-made designs for the US market. With the increase in pre-shelled nuts, the need for functionality was also lessened. After the 1980s, Chinese and Taiwanese imports that copied the traditional German designs took over. [3] [14] The recreated "Bavarian village" of Leavenworth, Washington, features a nutcracker museum. Many other materials also serve to make decorated nutcrackers, such as porcelain, silver, and brass; the museum displays samples. The United States Postal Service (USPS) issued four stamps in October 2008 with custom-made nutcrackers made by Richmond, Virginia artist Glenn Crider. [15]
Some artists, among them the multi-instrumentalist Mike Oldfield, have used the sound nutcrackers make in music. [16]
An old belief among the Malay people in Southeast Asia states that an areca nutcracker (kacip pinang) can be placed under a baby's pillow to prevent any harm from paranormal creatures. [17]
Many animals shell nuts to eat them, including using tools. The Capuchin monkey is a fine example. Parrots use their beaks as natural nutcrackers, in much the same way smaller birds crack seeds. In this case, the pivot point stands opposite the nut, at the jaw, or the beak.
Walnut trees are any species of tree in the plant genus Juglans, the type genus of the family Juglandaceae, the seeds of which are referred to as walnuts. All species are deciduous trees, 10–40 metres (33–131 ft) tall, with pinnate leaves 200–900 millimetres (7.9–35.4 in), with 5–25 leaflets; the shoots have chambered pith, a character shared with the wingnuts (Pterocarya), but not the hickories (Carya) in the same family.
In botany, a nut is a fruit from a tree consisting of a hard or tough nutshell protecting a kernel which is usually edible. The shell is indehiscent, meaning it does not open to release the seed. Most seeds come from fruits that naturally free themselves from the shell, but this is not the case in nuts such as hazelnuts, chestnuts, and acorns, which have hard shell walls and originate from a compound ovary.
Macadamia is a genus of four species of trees in the flowering plant family Proteaceae. They are indigenous to Australia, native to northeastern New South Wales and central and southeastern Queensland specifically. Two species of the genus are commercially important for their fruit, the macadamia nut. Global production in 2015 was 160,000 tonnes. Other names include Queensland nut, bush nut, maroochi nut, bauple nut and, in the US, they are also known as Hawaii nut. It was an important source of bushfood for the Aboriginal peoples.
Pine nuts, also called piñón, pinoli, or pignoli, are the edible seeds of pines. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, only 29 species provide edible nuts, while 20 are traded locally or internationally owing to their seed size being large enough to be worth harvesting; in other pines, the seeds are also edible but are too small to be of notable value as human food. The biggest producers of pine nuts are China, Russia, North Korea, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The northern nutcracker, previously known as spotted nutcracker and Eurasian nutcracker, is a passerine bird in the crow family Corvidae. It is slightly larger than the Eurasian jay but has a much larger bill and a slimmer looking head without any crest. The feathering over its body is predominantly chocolate brown with distinct white spots and patches. The wings and upper tail are black with a greenish-blue gloss.
Juglans nigra, the eastern American black walnut, is a species of deciduous tree in the walnut family, Juglandaceae, native to central and eastern North America, growing mostly in riparian zones.
Juglans ailantifolia, the Japanese walnut, is a species of walnut native to Japan and Sakhalin.
A nutcracker is a tool for cracking nuts.
A nut butter is a spreadable foodstuff made by grinding nuts or seeds into a paste. The result has a high fat content and can be spread like dairy butter. True nut butters include:
The universal nut sheller is a hand-operated machine capable of shelling raw peanuts.
Macadamia oil, also known as macadamia nut oil, is a non-volatile oil extracted from the nuts of the macadamia tree, indigenous to Australia. This oil is used in culinary applications as a frying or salad oil, and in cosmetics for its emollient properties and as a fragrance fixative.
Cracker Jack is a snack consisting of caramel-coated popcorn and peanuts.
"The Nutcracker and the Mouse King" is a novella–fairy tale written in 1816 by Prussian author E. T. A. Hoffmann, in which young Marie Stahlbaum's favorite Christmas toy, the Nutcracker, comes alive and, after defeating the evil Mouse King in battle, whisks her away to a magical kingdom populated by dolls. The story was originally published in Berlin in German as part of the collection Kinder-Märchen, Children's Stories, by In der Realschulbuchhandlung. In 1892, the Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and choreographers Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov turned Alexandre Dumas' adaptation of the story into the ballet The Nutcracker.
The Nuttiest Nutcracker is a 1999 animated direct-to-video Christmas film loosely based on the 1892 ballet The Nutcracker. The film was directed by Harold Harris and starred the voices of Jim Belushi, Cheech Marin, and Phyllis Diller. This film follows a group of anthropomorphic fruits and vegetables. Their goal is to help the Nutcracker's army get a star to the top of a Christmas tree before midnight and stop a rodent army from destroying Christmas. The film was released on home video by Columbia TriStar Home Video in 1999. The film aired on CBS December 4, 1999, in addition to being shown on cable.
Macadamia tetraphylla is a tree species in the family Proteaceae native to Australia. Common names include macadamia nut, bauple nut, prickly macadamia, Queensland nut, rough-shelled bush nut and rough-shelled Queensland nut.
A walnut is the edible seed of any tree of the genus Juglans, particularly the Persian or English walnut, Juglans regia. They are accessory fruit because the outer covering of the fruit is technically an involucre and thus not morphologically part of the carpel; this means it cannot be a drupe but is instead a drupe-like nut.
The H2 Hinde Tree is a heritage-listed tree of the species Macadamia integrifolia at Colliston, 926 Gilston Road, Gilston, City of Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 14 August 2008.
Nutcracker dolls, also known as Christmas nutcrackers, are decorative nutcracker figurines most commonly made to resemble a toy soldier. In German tradition, the dolls are symbols of good luck, frightening away malevolent spirits. While nearly all nutcrackers from before the first half of the 20th century are functional, a significant proportion of modern nutcrackers are primarily decorative, and not able to crack nuts.
All in a Nutshell is a Donald Duck animated short film produced by Walt Disney Productions and originally released in 1949 by RKO Radio Pictures in Technicolor.
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