There Is No Such Thing as a Raw Cashew

Go into any shop and you will find bags of cashews labelled raw. Every one of them is lying, and the honest alternative would have ended in a lawsuit.

A cashew does not grow inside a shell the way an almond or a walnut does. It hangs underneath a bright red or yellow thing called a cashew apple, dangling off the bottom as though it were an afterthought, and the shell around it is lined with a caustic oil called urushiol. That is the same compound that makes an encounter with poison ivy so memorable. Cashews belong to the same plant family, the Anacardiaceae, as poison ivy, poison oak and sumac — the nut you eat by the handful is a close cousin of the plant you were warned about as a child.

So every cashew sold anywhere is steamed or roasted first, still in its shell, to destroy the oil before anyone handles it. The people who do the shelling wear gloves. What the shops call raw means only that it was not roasted a second time afterwards. There is no third option, and there never has been.

The cashew apple, meanwhile, is delicious, spoils within a day, and is therefore almost never exported. In Brazil and parts of India it is pressed and sold as a drink, which means most of the world has spent its whole life eating the nut with no idea what the fruit tastes like. We have all been handed the small hard part and none of the good part.