A warm holiday tradition: Chestnuts are relatively low cal, low fat and high in nostalgia
When I was growing up in Pennsylvania, Christmas wouldn't have been Christmas (to paraphrase Jo March) without chestnuts.
Even Thanksgiving dinner ended with chestnuts on the table. We'd polish off the pumpkin and the mincemeat pies, then get down to the serious business of peeling hot chestnuts, in the process littering my mother's best damask tablecloth with empty shells.
My Tuscan-born grandfather liked to boil his chestnuts, and he always added a splash of red wine before serving. When boiled (see inset box), the smooth brown shells peel easily and the nut is moister.
I boil chestnuts if I'm using them in stuffing or other recipes, but for eating out of hand, I think roasting brings out their starchy sweetness best.
My mother would often roast chestnuts for us kids as a late-night snack in winter, not exactly by the open fire — we didn't have a working fireplace — but we would eat them in front of the flickering fake hearth, play a little Nat King Cole, and pretend.
We didn't know back then, or much care, but chestnuts are a pretty healthy snack. Though they have twice the starch of a potato, they are a source of potassium and are a low-fat nut, according to "The Food Bible" by Judith Wills. A two-ounce serving of chestnuts (about five) has 85 calories, while two ounces of raw peanuts has 282 calories and same amount of hazelnuts has 325 calories.
Chestnuts through the ages
Chestnuts are believed to be among the first foods eaten by prehistoric man.
The smooth brown nuts are common all over southern Europe; similar species are grown in China and Japan. They can be added to soups and rice dishes, roasted or stewed with meats, ground into flour to make pasta, polenta, bread or cake, and sweetened with syrup for desserts like the classic marrons glacés.
On my first trip abroad as a teenager, I spent a month in London in January. There I was enchanted to find chestnuts being roasted and sold by street vendors. I would fill my pockets with them, warming my frozen fingers and my homesick heart.
Later, when I lived in New York City, fresh chestnuts were readily found at many neighborhood green grocers, but when I moved to Seattle 10 years ago, they were harder to come by. They are more available now, especially during the holiday season, and recently I learned that chestnuts are being grown in the Northwest.
Most of the chestnuts sold in the United States today are imported from Europe or Asia. If you were born early enough in the last century, you might have tasted an American chestnut. Those stately trees once thrived all over the eastern U.S., but by 1950 the entire population was gone. A devastating blight discovered in 1904 not only wiped out this important cash crop, it crippled the timber-dependent economies of some rural areas, particularly Appalachia.
Grown in the Northwest
Today the American Chestnut Foundation is using genetic technology to create a blight-resistant hybrid of the American chestnut tree. Meanwhile, farmers in the Northwest and California are successfully nurturing a Japanese-Italian hybrid, among them a Western Washington couple, Ray and Carolyn Young, of Allen Creek Farm, in Ridgefield, Clark County.
When the Youngs went looking for acreage so they'd have room for hobby breeding and showing basset hounds, they never imagined they'd spend their retirement years farming chestnuts. But soon after buying a 20-acre farm, they began researching agricultural opportunities.
"We wanted something high-profit, that we could manage ourselves and that wouldn't take 24 hours a day," explains Carolyn Young, a former math teacher and systems engineer for Hughes Aircraft.
Chestnuts seemed ideal. The trees need wind to pollinate, and Ridgefield is in a breezy corner of Western Washington, just a mile from the Columbia River at the northern tip of the Willamette Valley. The ashy soil there, courtesy of Mount St. Helens, is conducive to the crop as well.
The Youngs planted their 800-tree orchard in 1999. "The first year we got six nuts and we named each of them," Young recalls. "The second year we got 50 pounds and we ate them. This year we expected a few hundred pounds and ended up with 2,000. We were completely overwhelmed."
Since buying a harvester wasn't in the business plan until next year and with his wife out of town on other business, Ray Young spent much of October single-handedly harvesting their crop. He worked so hard he lost 14 pounds.
Direct from the grower
The Youngs set up a Web site early, and in just two years chestnutsonline.com has recorded 17,000 hits nationwide.
"Dealing directly with a grower means you get fresher nuts that have been properly stored," says Young. Because chestnuts have a high water content, they need to be kept cool. The Youngs are storing their harvest in a refrigerated railroad container car, which they say will keep them in good shape until January.
In addition to fresh chestnuts, Allen Creek Farm sells dried chestnuts, gift packs, chestnut knives and roasting pans. They have a number of other "value-added products" in mind for next year, but these nascent entrepreneurs aren't willing to divulge details.
And at the moment, they aren't looking farther ahead than January. "We love January. It's the one month we have no work to do."
Providence Cicero: providencecicero@aol.com
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