To All,
The presentation and the party favors will give your guests an appreciation of this impressive tree and of the rescue efforts under way. As your guests leave, they will congratulate you on your thought-provoking edutainment. Perhaps you will inspire one of your guests to become a chestnut activist, and in this way your party might be the catalyst for the resurgence of this forest giant.
This time of the year we are assailed by the phrase, "Chestnuts roasting on a open fire." Now that my consciousness has been raised by a year of fruit exploring, I realize that I have never had chestnuts even though bins of them are readily available in every grocery store. I picked some up at Wegman's, a grocery store that just opened in Burlington. Though Maria had warned us that it was upscale, Mike and I took an exploratory trip there so we could wander through the aisles and stare glassy-eyed at all the high-end products. Chestnuts were $5.99/pound at Wegman's, so I got 0.59 pounds of them for $3.53. I now had sixteen of these glossy mahogany beauties. Below are three pictures.
- My pile of sixteen.
- Five shots that show the various sides of a chestnut. There is usually a round side and a flat side, but sometimes both sides are flat, as in the one in front on the left. You will soon see why these various shapes exist.
- Close-up of the flat side. Note the eye-pleasing pattern.
The pictures below give you a sense of the various parts of the chestnut plant.
- The spreading chestnut tree.
- The trunk. The lower forty feet of the trunk will sometimes be straight and without branches.
- The leaves. They are long, slender, and sharply toothed.
- The flowers. There are separate male flowers (the fuzzy ones) and female flowers. Both types appear on the same tree.
- The fruit before it starts to split. The tree is full of the round, stickery fruits, which look like airborne sea urchins. These prickly burs are "...the only effective anti-squirrel device ever invented," according to Susan Freinkel, American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree, 2007, p. 137.
- The fruit when it starts to split. You can see that there are often multiple nuts inside each fruit. If there are two nuts in a fruit, then each fruit has a round, outer side and a flat, inner side that faces the other nut. If there are three nuts in a fruit, then the nut in the middle will have both sides flat.
- The fully ripe fruit that has split open to spill out the nuts. When a fruit opens like this, a botanist says that it has dehisced.
- The harvested nuts.
- A few drawings and photos to illustrate the various parts of the tree.
In choosing pictures, I have been careful to avoid pictures of the horse chestnut, which, despite the name, is unrelated to the true chestnut and is in a different family. A great many of the purported chestnut pictures on the Internet are of the horse chestnut tree. Pictures of the latter are much easier to come by because it is spectacular when in bloom and also because it is a common tree. The first picture below shows the showy horse chestnut inflorescence, and the second gives an idea of how striking a horse chestnut tree in bloom can be when covered with these inflorescences. The confusion caused by the similarity in names is widespread; it is thought that Longfellow's spreading chestnut tree was really a horse chestnut. The horse chestnut is common in New England. One that I have been admiring for three decades is on the grounds of Harvard Law School right where Broadway emerges from the underpass and hits Mass Ave.
I do not have ready access to an open fire, but I do have a stove. I googled "How to roast chestnuts in an oven," and the first of the 149,000 hits was Martha Stewart's recipe. This is the first time that Martha and I have crossed paths, so I figured that I would try to find my inner Martha Stewart. I went to http://www.marthastewart.com/276336/how-to-roast-and-peel-chestnuts/@center/276958/holiday-entertaining for her recipe. Just for comparison, I went to http://www.epicurious.com/articlesguides/blogs/editor/2014/12/how-to-roast-chestnuts-the-right-way.html?mbid=synd_fox and found a recipe that differed in almost every particular. I decided to break the tie by going to http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Roast-Chestnuts-in-the-Oven-1/ but found still more differences. Perplexed, as usual, I decided to divide my chestnuts into groups and try different methods. I started with six nuts. I was apprehensive since this is the first roasting I have done since my unsuccessful jack fruit experiments.
The essence of roasting a chestnut is to put it in a 350 degree oven for 30 minutes. There are three complications. First, the heat causes the insides of the chestnut to steam, which means that the chestnut would explode in the oven if the steam were not allowed to escape from the nut. Therefore, you score the nut about an eight of an inch deep to give the steam an exit path. One recipe says to cut an X on the front side, i.e., the roundish side. Another says to cut once across the front. The third says to cut almost all the way around the nut. For my first six nuts, I adopted the third method since I thought this would make it easier to peel. I used a steak knife to do the scoring, and I had to be careful to avoid scoring my hand; the round, smooth shape of the nut makes it hard to secure, so knifework is chancy.
Second, how should the nuts be placed in the oven? One recipe says to wrap a single layer of nuts in aluminum foil and close the foil except for a single escape hole. The other two recipes say to just lay them on a flat surface like a cookie sheet. For my first six nuts, I adopted the second method.
Third, when the roasted nuts come out of the oven, you need to peel them while still hot without burning your fingers. The roasted chestnuts have both a hard outer shell and an inner, paper-like wrapper, and you are supposed to remove them both. The first roasted nut that I grabbed was very cooperative; the shell and wrapper both came off easily. I popped it into my mouth. Its texture was sort of like a little baked potato, but with a very pleasing taste. Of the remaining five nuts, there was only one more where the shell and wrapper both came off easily. I found that the shell was easy to remove, but on four of them the wrapper stuck tight to the nut. The Internet experts, while they say to remove the wrapper, don't say how. I scraped away with my fingernails and with a knife, but progress was extremely slow and tedious. Adding to the hazard was that the nuts were still hot. Peeling those little devils was a real trial. I half-destroyed a couple of the nuts. Finally, in frustration, I just ate the entire nut, wrapper and all, and I found that the wrapper really did not decrease my enjoyment that much. These nuts cooled off while I struggled to peel them, and I can report that they are better hot.
Below is a picture of my six nuts when I took them from the oven. The six nuts look like seven because half of a shell has come off during roasting. There is also a close-up of two of them. The one on the left is the one that is missing half a shell; the one on the right has all of its shell, but part of it peeled back during roasting. These are the two it was easy to peel.
The inner wrapper is still a mystery to me. Is there some way to cook the nuts so that it comes off easily? Is there some trick for removing it easily? Is there any drawback to eating it?
My roasting was successful in that none of my chestnuts exploded. I don't see any need to try out any other methods.
The verdict: Hot chestnuts are a nice change of pace. They taste good, and they are different from other nuts. The drawback is that it is something of a a hassle to roast and peel them. Also, extreme care is needed to avoid cutting your hand while scoring them.
According to Wikipedia, the chestnut differs from other nuts in that it is low in fats and protein. Its carbohydrate profile is much like wheat or rice. Also unlike other nuts, it has significant vitamin C. In fact, a chestnut is a lot more like a jack fruit seed than a standard nut.
This history of the American chestnut is well know. A century ago it was a dominant tree in the East. Roughly one hardwood tree in four in the eastern deciduous forest was a chestnut. Then came a fungus from Asia that killed some three billion American chestnut trees, and now the American chestnut has almost vanished. All that remain are a very few isolated adult trees and a large number of stumps that go through a cycle of sprouting, growing for a few years, and then being killed by the fungus. In all my tree watching I have seen only one mature chestnut tree; it was beside the stone house on Acton Hill in Vermont. I have see a good many stump sprouts. Efforts are being made to breed resistance to the fungus. Asian chestnuts, which are immune to this fungus, are being used in these breeding attempts. European chestnuts are not immune, but the fungus apparently has not reached Europe. (I have been unable to determine where the chestnuts that I ate were from.)
The loss due to the decline of the chestnut from the point of view of the animals has been stated as follows.
In its prime, the American chestnut was a keystone species, crucial to the health of a multitude of organisms in its ecosystem....Bears, deer, turkeys, blue jays, squirrels and other animals ate the large, nutritious chestnuts. After losing so many mature chestnut trees, wildlife populations declined and became less diverse. The oaks that have since replaced the chestnut cannot support as many animals; the acorns they produce are only half as nutritious. And chestnuts once generated larger quantities of nuts that oaks do today. (William Powell, "The American Chestnut's Genetic Rebirth," Scientific American, March 2014, p. 70.)
From the human point of view, aside from the nuts, chestnut timber is of high quality. If it were available today, most decks would probably be made from chestnut wood.
Why is an oft-told tale referred to as a "chestnut"? Freinkel, American Chestnut, p. 16, conjectures that it is because, "Unlike other nut-bearing trees, chestnuts are perennial and prodigious producers."
Artists have not put the chestnut to much use. Two example are given below, and more can be found in the party tip and the site referenced there.
I have not found many chestnut products, just a chestnut spread from France, and, therefore, probably made from European chestnuts, and the mysterious oven-dried chestnut chips. (Also see the next paragraph.)
Here's your party tip. Enthrall your guests with a presentation on the history of this majestic tree that will tell the chestnut story and will make your guests aware of attempts to bring it back. Conclude your presentation by announcing that as a party favor each guest will be given a piece of chestnut memorabilia. Let each guest make a selection from The Chestnut Store at http://acf.donorshops.com/products/merchandise.php.They can choose from the following products, which are pictured below.
- Nametags made from the wood of the Indiana champion chestnut tree, which died in 1998.
- Prints that tell the chestnut story.
- Carvings from chestnut wood.
- Chestnut refrigerator magnets.
- Chestnut coat rack with wooden pegs.
- The Chestnut Learning Box (only $300, picture omitted). You will probably want to buy this for yourself; it will provide the material for the presentation to your guests that will tell them the chestnut story.
- Chestnut necktie. For comfort and flexibility eight thin pieces of chestnut are attached to a leather backing with an elastic neck strap. This would make a nice companion piece to the whale tie.
- Chestnut keyholder with clock.
- Many other must-have products,
