The woods near my home are full of shagbark hickory trees. Occasionally, I pick up some of the nuts and bring them home. Wild hickory nuts are delicious-but the nuts are small, and almost impossible to crack (without destroying most of the nutmeats).
Are there any cultivated varieties? (with larger nuts)?
Pecans are a variety of hickory, but I know what you mean about honest-to-god hickory nuts. Even though it took several hours for me to crack, pick and eat a hatful of scalybarks I picked up off the ground in a Kentucky park, they were even better than the pecans we had in the back yard in Prattville, Alabama.
I vaguely recall some scalybark brittle or something similar my grandmother would have made.
Yes, you can buy cultivars of shagbark hickory trees.
I don’t know if they are bred for nuts that are easier to crack & extract.
When we were little kids my mom would take us to “the nut trees”, a green space a couple blocks away that held a few hickory nut trees, and we would spend an hour gathering hickory nuts, most in their dark brown ‘holders’, in a brown paper bag. The incredible fragrance of those nuts is one of my childhood memories. We spent hours cracking them open with a hammer trying to get out the nutmeats. (it kept us busy - no video games or computers then). Across the street there were trees with identical looking nuts - pignuts? - that were sour/bitter, not fit for eating… I was also amazed to find once that hickory nuts were being sold by someone on eBay. Because you never see or hear of hickory nuts any more…this is probably OT and its all I got, but I couldn’t resist putting in my two cents.