Take a tip from the cooks of France's Périgord region: invest in a bottle of walnut oil. A small one - it doesn't keep long, and store it in the dark. But you'll be glad you did. A vinaigrette made with it will lift a salad into another stratosphere. And it adds a festive zip to holiday season salads!

Walnut trees grow prolifically in South West France. The nut's uses stretch beyond the kitchen. Walnut shells are ground down and used as aircraft insulation as well as to lubricate the tip of oilrig drills. The compound stops oil sludge from clogging the tips and forces it to float away. The yellow dye that comes out of the walnut's green outer shells and clings stubbornly to your fingers is what helps to color your fake tan.

But while the oil is expensive to buy, it's economical to use. If you add a teaspoon of it to a vegetable oil when making vinaigrette, it will flavor it entirely, making the vinaigrette cheaper than when you use a good olive oil. A few drops on a chicken breast or fillet of fish add a wonderful nuttiness.

The people of the Périgord are proud of their trees. But they're a recent crop, dating only back to the early 20th century when they were planted en masse. Before then, walnuts came predominantly from Grenoble. If you buy walnuts in Canada, they're called noix de Grenoble, much to the irritation of the Périgordins. Now California competes with the Périgord to export walnuts, particularly to the English.

To make the best cold-pressed walnut oil, a heavy granite millstone grinds the interior meat slowly enough that the oil is extracted without heating the kernels. Look for the best quality you can find, labelled première pression à froid, which has the best flavor and the highest level of omega-3 fatty acids.

As to the nuts left whole, here's a small-talk tidbit: they were once called brain nuts. As William Cole noted in 1657, "Wall-nuts have the perfect Signature of the Head: The Kernel hath the very figure of the Brain, and there it is very profitable for the Brain, and resists poysons; For if the Kernel be bruised, and moystned with the quintessence of Wine, and laid up the Crown of the Head, it comforts the brain and head mightily."

He's not that far out: the nut contains tryptophan which produces serotonin in the brain.

There you go.

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