Dublin shops and supermarkets put out seasonal bags of monkey nuts each Halloween as a nod to tradition, but sales have slowed over the years. Why that is, depends on who you ask.
Last Halloween, Irish Reddit user ChiggyVonRichtofen was confused and he turned to the Internet for solace.
Each year, ChiggyVonRichtofen and his wife bag up monkey nuts and sweets for the local children without incident, he said.
“But this year, two different kids complained about getting nuts (even though there were sweets in the bag too!), and one of them said it was ‘a load of shite’,” he wrote to the forum.
It may not be that kids these days are spoilt by all the chocolate and sweets, too good now for old-fashioned treats. In fact, it’s not clear monkey nuts at Halloween were ever that popular for eating.
Regina Sexton, a food historian at University College Cork, says that wasn’t really why they were given out. “I think they weren’t so much an item of consumption, even though children did consume them, they were there for different reasons,” she says.
Mary Kennedy remembers when chocolates and lollipops were nowhere to be seen around Halloween.
“Halloween was always fruit and nuts,” she said on Monday morning, as she set up her stall on Moore Street. “We’d get grandparents coming along and they’ll still buy the fruit and nuts. We don’t sell them all year round. We only sell them at Halloween.”
In the two weeks leading up to 31 October, Kennedy and others on Moore Street will package up monkey nuts as usual, but the sales aren’t as strong as they used to be. “There’s always a certain amount that will have them,” she says. “And then there are those who’ll throw them in the bin.”
“Halloween now, I mean you look at any of the supermarkets, they’ve big boxes of sweets, tins of lollipops,” says Kennedy. “That’s what Halloween changed around to.”
Others also attribute the decline of monkey nuts to the fact that Halloween became focused towards the candy aisles of supermarkets.
It might also be because of increased education, say Brian Farrelly and Grainne Gannon, sitting in a cafe in Phibsboro.
Both their young children have nut allergies, and with an increasing variety of nuts available in Ireland, monkey nuts are now passé, says Gannon.
Another idea they offer is that children grow up with more sweets these days. “It’s just not as much of a treat anymore,” says Gannon. “Like my mam talks about getting oranges in her stocking from Santa, whereas now that would be the weirdest thing ever.”
For Gannon’s husband, Farrelly, the monkey nut never really appealed to his younger self.
“The dominant feature of any bag in my area would be the covering of monkey nuts at the bottom and other fruit,” he says. “You give kids fruit these days, they kind of look at you a bit strange, like you’re a weird old man.”
Gannon says she is partial – and was when trick-or-treating – to the golden-shelled monkey nut. Farrelly, not so much.
“Years and years ago, I remember when my parents were buying stuff for Halloween, we’d go check the fruit bowl,” he says. “The fruit bowl in our house was still, it was still covered in monkey nuts from last year!”
It’s damning evidence that the Halloween “favourite” wasn’t really favoured. But their prevalence at Halloweens past may never have stemmed from their taste at all.
It was, perhaps, tradition that saw the monkey nut’s rise, and changing tastes, its decline.
Changing patterns of consumption and the influence of American culture are behind the decline of monkey nuts, says Sexton, the food historian, author of A Little History of Irish Food.
“I think people have become more sophisticated in their choice of nuts [in Ireland],” she says. “There is a greater variety of nuts there because they’ve a good fat profile.”
They have entered into mainstream food patterns, says Sexton. “Much nicer ones like walnuts and Brazil nuts, I think, are more appetising and have a better flavour.”
But nuts around Halloween have a particular significance, she says. Often, nuts were used in rural areas in rituals for divining the future. Traditionally, hazelnuts would have been used, but over time peanuts became more available.
“If we talk about the past, in the last generation, say in the last 25, 30 years, there would have been easier access to peanuts coming into the country as an item that was available in shops and that was cheap,” says Sexton.
Shops stocked piles of peanuts for Halloween, she said. “I think people wouldn’t so much buy them for the fact that they liked them. I think they were buying them because it was ritualistic, keeping in a traditional pattern.”
As people migrated from rural Ireland to cities in the 19th century, they brought a strong rural legacy of Halloween games and practices, and these traditions continued.
“People bring traditions with them. Then it becomes a rural practice, games and divination in an urban context,” says Sexton. “It might have been difficult to get hazelnuts, so monkey nuts, which you wouldn’t use in rural Ireland, filled the gap there.”
“As you move along again, the way that Halloween is being celebrated now has been influenced by American factors,” she says. “So Halloween gets exported to America and then it’s imported back in with embellishments.”
Traditions get blurred over time, says Sexton.
Growing up eating monkey nuts – or refusing to eat them – was the legacy of these rural traditions, says Sexton. But that “we didn’t really know why we had them”, she says.
Over at Morton’s supermarket in Ranelagh, Ger Ellis orders the fruit and vegetables each day, and the odd monkey nut at Halloween – but nowhere near the number they used to.
“I don’t know when it happened, the last ten years anyway,” says Ellis. “I certainly didn’t get all the confectionery they seem to be getting now.”
Ellis says that sales of the humble nut are “quite poor” around Halloween these days, while apples and satsumas still sell ahead of the festival.
Morton’s will stock monkey nuts this year, says Ellis. But it’s more out of a sense of tradition than anything else.
“We carry them purely for the sake of it. There really won’t be much of a demand for them,” says Ellis. “(…) It’s all in confectionery, a huge, huge demand for confectionery.”
Food historian Sexton says the past popularity of monkey nuts as a trick-or-treat hand-out was never because of how they tasted.
“It is [or was] adherence to tradition. Without having certain features of that tradition you feel that you’re not enacting the tradition properly,” she says.
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