Welcome to the summary page for FabulousFusionFood's Cook's Guide entry for Cashew along with all the recipes employing Cashew presented on this site, with 113 recipes in total.

This is a continuation of an entire series of pages that will, I hope, allow my visitors to better navigate this site. As well as displaying recipes by name, country and region of origin I am now planning a whole series of pages where recipes can be located by meal type and main ingredient. This page gives a listing of all the Cashew recipes added to this site.

These recipes, all contain Cashew as a major wild food ingredient.

The cashew nut is the seed of the Cashew Anacardium occidentale plant of the Anacardiaceae (poison ivy) family. It grows as a small evergreen tree growing to 10-12 m tall, with a short, often irregularly-shaped trunk. The tree is unusual in that it develops a pseudofruit, an oval or pear-shaped accessory fruit or false fruit that develops from the receptacle of the cashew flower. Called the cashew apple, the true fruit of the cashew tree develops as a kidney or boxing-glove shaped drupe at the end of the pseudofruit. Within the true fruit is a single seed, the cashew nut. Although a nut in the culinary sense, in the botanical sense the fruit of the cashew is a seed. However, the true fruit is classified as a nut by some botanists.

Originally spread from Brazil by the Portuguese, the cashew tree is now cultivated in all regions with a sufficiently warm and humid climate. Cashew nuts are a common ingredient in Asian cooking. They can also be ground into a spread called cashew butter similar to peanut butter. Cashews have a very high oil content, and they are used in some other nut butters to add extra oil. In Europe cashews are usually eaten dried, roasted and salted as a snack or in salads. Unsalted cashews are generally used for cooking and they're particularly popular in south Indian cuisine, used whole or ground and often added just before serving.