After performing the not-so-easy operations of extracting the chestnut from its bur, hard-peel cover, and adhering tannic skin, one has a nourishing nut that is 40 to 60 percent water, 30 to 50 percent glu-cids, 1 to 3 percent lipids, and 3 to 7 percent protids. In addition, the nut has significant amounts of trace minerals which vary, depending on the soil; and chestnuts are the only nuts to contain a significant amount of vitamin C.
Dried, the chestnut loses most of its water as its caloric value increases. According to the usual conversion table, 100 grams of fresh chestnuts provide 199 calories; dried, they provide almost twice (371 calories) that amount. (For comparative purposes, 100 grams of potatoes = 86 calories; 100 grams of whole grain wheat bread = 240 calories; 100 grams of walnuts = 660 calories.) (Randoin and de Gallic 1976).
When we pause to consider that our sources place the daily consumption of chestnuts by an individual at between 1 and 2 kilograms, we can quickly understand why the chestnut qualifies as a staple food. And like such staples as wheat or potatoes, chestnuts can be prepared in countless ways. Corsican tradition, for example, calls for 22 different types of dishes made from chestnut flour to be served on a wedding day (Robiquet 1835). When fresh, chestnuts can be eaten raw, boiled, baked, and roasted (roasted chestnuts were sold on the streets of Rome in the sixteenth century and are still sold on the streets of European towns in the wintertime).
Chestnuts also become jam and vanilla-chestnut cream, and they are candied. When dried, they can also be eaten raw, but they are usually ground into flour or made into a porridge, soup, or mash (polenta in Italy) and mixed with vegetables, meat, and lard. As flour, chestnuts become bread or pancakes and thickeners for stews. Indeed, speaking of the versatility of chestnuts, they very nearly became the raw material for the production of sugar. Antoine Parmentier (that same great apothecary who granted the potato the dignity of human food) extracted sugar from the nuts and sent a chestnut sugarloaf weighing several pounds to the Academy in Lyon (Parmentier 1780). Research on the possibility of placing chestnuts at the center of the French sugar industry was intensified a few years later during the Continental blockade of the early nineteenth century. Napoleon’s choice, however, was to make sugar from beets.
World History
