the French name marrons glacés. One easy method for roasting is to cut a slit in the top of each nut and heat in a shallow container, tossing occasionally, at 400 °F for 10-15 minutes. The nuts must be slit as they tend to explode when roasted. They may also be pan-roasted or boiled.
Another important use of chestnuts is to be ground into flour, which can then be used to prepare bread, cakes and pasta.
Chestnut-based recipes and preparations are making a comeback in Italian cuisine, as part of the trend toward rediscovery of traditional dishes.
To preserve chestnuts to eat through the winter, they must be made perfectly dry after they come out of their green husk; then put into a box or a barrel mixed with, and covered over by, fine and dry sand, three parts of sand to one part of chestnuts. Any maggots in any of the chestnuts will emerge and work up through the sand to get to the air without damaging other chestnuts. Chestnuts to be grown in the spring need to be kept in moist sand and chilled over the winter.
Chestnuts should not be confused with Horse-chestnuts, which are used in the United Kingdom to play a game called conkers. Conkers, or Horse-chestnuts, are poisonous and are obtained from the tree of the same name.
Other products
The wood is similar to oak wood in being decorative and very durable. Due to disease, American Chestnut wood has almost disappeared from the market. It is difficult to obtain large size timber from the Sweet Chestnut, due to the high degree of splitting and warping when it dries. The wood of the Sweet Chestnut is most used in small items where durability is important, such as fencing and wooden outdoor cladding ('shingles') for buildings. In Italy, it is also used to make barrels used for aging balsamic vinegar.
The bark was also a useful source of natural tannins, used for tanning leather before the introduction of synthetic tannins.
In popular culture
- The most famous depiction of chestnuts is probably their mention in the Mel Tormé and Bob Wells' classic, The Christmas Song which begins with the phrase "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire." Written in 1944, the song is most identified with Nat King Cole, although Tormé recorded his own version in 1965.
- A reference to the chestnut tree was made in the movie Howards End directed by James Ivory and based on the novel by E.M.Forster, where Mrs. Ruth Wilcox (played by Vanessa Redgrave) converses with Ms. Margaret Schlegel (played by Emma Thompson) about her (Ms. Wilcox's)childhood home in "Howards End", where superstitious farmers would place pig teeth in the bark of the chest nut trees and then they would chew on the bark to ease the discomfort and pain derived from tooth aches.
- In the Polish film, Ashes and Diamonds, two characters reminisce about the chestnut trees that once lined a famous Warsaw boulevard now destroyed by the Nazi's after the Warsaw Uprising.
Diseases
The American Chestnut, formerly one of the dominant trees of the eastern United States, has been almost wiped out by a fungal disease, chestnut blight, Cryphonectria parasitica. The American chinkapins are also very susceptible to chestnut blight. The European and west Asian Sweet Chestnut is susceptible, but less so than the American, and the east Asian species are resistant. These resistant species, particularly Japanese Chestnut and Chinese Chestnut but also Seguin's Chestnut and Henry's Chestnut, have been used in breeding programs in the US to create hybrids with the American Chestnut that are also disease resistant.
Castanea species are used as food plants by the larvae of some Lepidoptera species; see list of Lepidoptera which feed on Castanea |
