a name given to many nuts, originally and primarily to those of the European ‘sweet’ or ‘Spanish’ chestnut tree, Castanea sativa, and later to various Asian and American relatives. These trees belong to regions with a temperate climate.
Chestnuts contain more starch and less oil than most other nuts and have had a special role as food for this reason. The European chestnut was formerly a staple food of great importance, but has now become more of a luxury.
The European chestnut, despite its name, is of W. Asian origin. Around 300 bc the Greek writer Xenophon described how the children of Persian nobles were fed on chestnuts to fatten them; and it was the Greeks who brought the tree to Europe, from Sardis in Asia Minor. But it flourished more in S. Europe than in its region of origin and deserved the name European long before this came into common use. The more specific name Spanish chestnut probably arose because the best chestnuts imported into Britain came from Spain.
The Romans had the tree in regular cultivation by 37 bc, when Virgil described it in his Eclogues. The Latin name, from which came the botanical name and modern European names, was bestowed on it for the town Castanea in Magnesia, where the tree was especially common. The Romans made chestnuts into flour, which was used to extend wheat flour, a practice which survives in S. Europe. Apicius gave a recipe for chestnuts cooked with lentils. The Romans also took the tree north, to Gaul and then to Britain.
Wild chestnuts are common all over S. Europe, especially in Italy, Corsica, S. France, and Spain. The trees, of medium size, are hardy and long-lived. One at the foot of Mount Etna was thought to be 2,000 years old when it was killed by the volcano erupting.
Nuts of wild varieties are relatively small but of good flavour. They have been an adequate staple food for peasants in poorer regions, and remain a useful foodstuff in the countryside. Rural uses of wild chestnuts include the original Italian polenta, a porridge which was made with chestnut meal before the introduction of maize from the New World; and bread and biscuits made of chestnut meal mixed with cereal flour.
Chestnut bread is characterized by large, irregular holes. Although the European chestnut has almost the same proportions of protein, starch, and fat as wheat, it lacks gluten to bind the bread together, and can only be used in moderate amounts. A higher proportion of chestnut meal is used in Italian necci, flat cakes baked on hot stones and resembling Indian chapati. Chestnut meal, called farina dolce (sweet flour) in Italian, is often used as a thickener in Italian dishes. In Italy chestnuts which have been dried to keep through the winter are called secchielli; in Spain pilongas. They need to be soaked or steamed before they can be used.
Howes (1948) remarks on the importance of chestnuts in Corsica.
A generation ago, there were old inhabitants in the more remote parts of the island who admitted they had never eaten ordinary or wheat bread, so dependent were they on chestnuts and chestnut flour.
In Britain the chestnut grows as far north as the Caledonian Canal. Evelyn (1644) gave the tree a warm recommendation.
Tis likewise observed, that this tree is so prevalent against cold, that where they stand, they defend other plantations from the injuries of the severest frosts: I am sure being planted in hedgerows, etc. or for avenues to our country-houses, they are a magnificent and royal ornament.
This prompted the planting of many more chestnut trees in England. However, again according to Evelyn, the nuts were not used for human food as much as they deserved to be.
But we give that fruit to our swine in England, which is amongst the delicacies of princes in other countries; … The best tables in France and Italy make them a service, eating them with salt, in wine or juice of lemmon and sugar; being first roasted in embers on the chaplet; and doubtless we might propagate their use amongst our common people, being a food so cheap, and so lasting.
Whereas wild chestnuts are a food of the poor, the large cultivated chestnuts are a luxury. Trees of these varieties produce only a single, large nut in each burr (nut-case) instead of several small ones. Many European languages have a different name for the finest cultivated nuts, e.g. marrons in French, as opposed to châtaignes for the wild chestnut or the ordinary cultivated kind. (However, there is no clear dividing line. Some châtaigniers are hard to distinguish from marronniers.)
The biggest and best marrons are grown in the region of Lyons, where they are candied to make the famous marrons glacés. However, French production of the cultivated chestnut has declined so much that most of their marrons glacés are now made with imported chestnuts.
Chestnuts are often employed in stuffings for poultry, e.g. turkey. Other chestnut preparations include purées for serving with meat and game; chestnuts cooked with Brussels sprouts; French chestnut soups and soufflés; the Italian castagnaccio, a semi-sweet baked dish incorporating other nuts and sultanas; numerous puddings (of which the Austrian Nesselrode pudding is the best known); many gateaux and cakes, in which chocolate is often combined with the chestnut; and chestnut ice creams.
Special perforated pans for roasting chestnuts over a fire used to be common items of equipment in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. In some European cities it is still possible in winter, especially just before Christmas, to buy freshly roasted chestnuts from stalls or barrows.
Outside Europe there are chestnuts of several other Castanea species. The Chinese chestnut, C. mollissima, has been cultivated in China for at least as long as its European counterpart, and used in much the same way: dried, roasted, or made into meal. It has nuts of good flavour, whose relatively thin skin can be peeled off easily. The Japanese chestnut, C. crenata, has large, starchy nuts which are usually eaten boiled, when they have some resemblance to potato. The American chestnut, C. dentata, once a common tree, especially in the Appalachians, bore excellent nuts, richer in oil than European chestnuts. The tree was widely cultivated until the the 20th century, when chestnut blight almost wiped it out. (European chestnut trees, which were also cultivated, were affected by the blight, but less so. The Chinese chestnut, which is resistant to it, is now the main species cultivated in the USA.)
Another American species, the dwarf chestnut, C. pumila, has small nuts of no commercial value, but of good flavour. It is sometimes called chinquapin, a name of American Indian origin, which is better reserved for trees of the genera Castanopsis and Chrysolepis, related to the chestnut but smaller and of a bushy character. American chinquapins include the golden chinquapin of the north-west of the USA, Chrysolepis chrysophylla. In E. India and SE Asia various species are cultivated to a limited extent. The nuts of all these are used in the familiar ways; boiled, roasted, or dried and ground to meal.
The horse chestnuts, Aesculus spp, are not closely related to true chestnuts or chinquapins, and the resemblance of their fruits is coincidental. The species common in Europe, A. hippocastanum, known as marron d'Inde in France, originally grew in Asia Minor and Greece. In 1557 a Flemish doctor resident in Constantinople sent some nuts to the great botanist Matthiolus in Vienna, remarking that in Turkish they were called kastane and used in a horse medicine. The large, handsome tree, which thus came to be called ‘horse chestnut’, then became popular as a shade tree. Its nuts, however, are bitter and inedible because of the presence of large amounts of tannins. These are soluble in water, so the nuts can be processed to produce an edible starch which, ground to meal, makes a famine food.
Other plants bearing nuts termed ‘chestnuts’ are less similar to the true kind. These include some leguminous plants such as the Tahiti (or Polynesian or Fiji) chestnut, Inocarpus fagifer (syn I. edulis), a tree of the tropical Pacific islands. The large, single, seeds, locally called mape and other names (ivi in Fiji), may be boiled or roasted, or grated to become an ingredient of breads or puddings. They are almost a staple food on some of the more remote islands. However, most authors follow Burkill (1965–6) in describing them as indigestible. They are sometimes fermented like breadfruit seeds, and it may be that this process, which makes it possible to store them underground for long periods, also reduces the indigestibility.
See also water chestnut; Chinese water chestnut.
Alan Davidson was a distinguished author and publisher, and one of the world's best-known writers on fish and fish cookery. In 1975 he retired early from the diplomatic service—after serving in, among other places, Washington, Egypt, Tunisia, and Laos, where he was British Ambassador—to pursue a fruitful second career as a food historian and food writer extraordinaire. Among his popular books are Seafood of South-East Asia, North Atlantic Seafood, and Mediterranean Seafood. In 2003, shortly before his death, he was awarded the Erasmus Prize for his contribution to European culture.
Bruneton-Governatori, Ariane (1984), Le Pain de bois, Toulouse: Eché.
Howes, F. N. (1948), Nuts, London: Faber.
