This was a problem especially with the nuts I bought locally, because stores have a tendency to keep nuts on the shelf far too long. Unfortunately, the taste I encountered more than any other was rancidity. Best to roast the nuts in a slow oven, 325 degrees, for about ten minutes, just until you begin to smell them and they color very lightly. But the almost pungent taste of hazelnutswhich is much more assertive than the taste of almondsis easily obliterated by a minute or two too long in the oven. Since I like toasty flavors so much, I usually think the darker the better. In my taste comparisons I also learned how easy it is to over-roast hazelnuts. Also, the skins of Piedmont nuts come off more easily after heating (skin adheres more or less tightly by variety), something that is crucial for candymakers who want to use whole nuts. The flavor of Viterbese hazelnuts is very fine, but that of Piedmont nuts is more intense. In my taste comparisons I understood why Piedmont hazelnuts have retained their reputation. The clusters look like beaten-gold oak leaves and acorns in Greek jewelry I expect Martha Stewart to be gilding them soon. There were still nuts on the trees, each tightly clustered with two or three distinctly lobed leaves, which are technically husks. trees are much larger), and the wood is said to be excellent for shepherd's sticks, because it doesn't splinter. The trunks are seldom thicker than a forearm (U.S. I was surprised at how small a hazelnut tree, a member of the birch family, islike a modest lilac. Last Christmas I had a chance to visit the family orchard that supplies the nuts for those irresistible tozzetti my friend's mother makes. How does the author's preference for one kind of hazelnet emerge from the essay? (Remember that we have excerpted paragraphs from the essay, so other things are going on in the article that are not happening within this abridged version.) If you, too, are nuts about nuts, you can read the whole essay by clicking here. The following paragraphs are an excerpt from a Corby Kummer essay (first published in the April 1996 issue of the Atlantic Monthly) that compares one kind of hazelnut to another. Let the reader figure out the preference from the language we use in the contrast let the language do its work. The trick is to allow the preference to grow out of the comparison without actually stating the obvious. Why should we compare this movie to the novel it is based on? Why should we compare these two short stories, one by a modern southern American Catholic woman and the other by a nineteenth-century French-Canadian man? Will the comparison actually help anyone's understanding of either one? What's the point of the comparison? When we've finished going through the various differences and similarities, is the reader left with that horrible feeling, So what? or have we actually accomplished something important? have we provided a unique insight into the nature of these two things that the reader would never have discovered otherwise?įinally, the business of a comparison and contrast essay is frequently (but not always) to demonstrate a preference for one thing over another. Third, there has to be a good reason to make the comparison. Shall we go from side to side, as if our essay were a ping-pong match, or should we dwell on one side before going over to the other side, essentially splitting our essay in half? It is possible to mix these two approaches, but our approach will determine the overall structure, pacing, and effect of the essay. We have, let's say, five points of difference between the two things that we want to contrast. There are some general rules to consider before we begin to write a comparison and contrast essay, however.įirst, is the comparison fair? Is it fair to compare the social nightlife of a small rural town in Oklahoma to the nightlife of Manhattan? Probably not, unless our comparison is going to lead our readers to a surprise: that for reasons they had never thought of before, the nightlife of Davis, Oklahoma, is more fun, more fulfilling than the nightlife of the Big Apple! What could be easier? We've got these two things movies, books, rock bands, decades, people, fashions, schools, ideas how are they alike and how are they different? The paper practically writes itself! (A comparison, incidentally, is the process of showing how things are alike a contrast is the process of showing differences.) Perhaps the most common assignment in a Composition course is the comparison and contrast essay.
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