Charlene’s older brother fought in Vietnam. A few years ago he returned there and visited the prison we call the Hanoi Hilton. An almond tree struggled up from the cement in the courtyard. A sign next to it explained that prisoners used the tree’s nuts as a source of food, the bark and leaves to cure dysentery, clean wounds, and soothe skin ulcers. The wood was used to make pipes and flutes. The tree provided shade from the sticky heat. While Charlene rolled balls of almond paste, she remembered her brother showing her a picture of the tree and the placard. She thought of the tree with its crusted bark and gentle leaves providing so much solace and comfort.

And for me, whether salted and roasted, or ground into paste, almonds are one of my favorite things to eat. As a little girl, I remember studying marzipan fruits painted with food colors and formed into oranges as a treat each Christmas. Later I learned that the flavor in the center of cake roses was, if I were lucky, almond paste, and as an adult, I’ve loved decorating cakes with cut out leaves, or flowers fashioned of it.

Native to India and east to Syria and Turkey, almonds were one of our first cultivated fruit trees and its domestication proof of our ancestors’ ingenuity. In the wild form, almonds contain cyanide. Early humans rid the nuts of their toxicity by roasting them. But domesticated almonds are not toxic. It’s believed that a common mutation occurred and that by this happy accident humans have a nontoxic source of almonds. They were easy to grow because they produce fruit from the seed and grafting isn’t necessary. Domesticated more than five thousand years ago, almonds were found in Tutankhamen’s tomb in Egypt and mentioned in the Bible when Aaron’s rod miraculously bore flowers and fruits.