Autumn Treasures: Chestnuts
(picture courtesy Prof. Elvio Bellini)
Autumn, with his woods of thousand colours, is the season of mushrooms and of chestnuts.
The latter is a delicious fruit which is in great demand for its quality and because it's a basic ingredient of a lot of recipes, ranging from traditional regional dishes to new ones more sophisticated and modern.
Until some decades ago the Chestnut tree (Castanea sativa Mill.) represented one of the few sources of support for the mountain dwellers which used all the parts of the Chestnut tree for every kind of uses.
The Chestnut tree played such a leading role in those days' life that the term "Chestnut age" is used remembering that time.
According to 1999 FAO's statistics, the greater world-wide producer of chestnuts is South Korea (22,4% of the total production) followed by China (21,9%) and Italy (14,7%). Italy produces about 78.000 tons of chestnuts yearly,
equivalent to about 51% of european production.
In fact chestnuts are greatly appreciated in Italy and they are an integral part of italian culture, as it's shown by the many feasts that animate hundreds of towns between october and november.
An important thing to know about the chestnuts' world is the difference between the chestnut and the marron:
marrons are bigger because there is a single fruit in every chestnut husk, they come in fact from trees grafted with domestic varieties; so they are homogeneous in shape, dimensions and colour;
chestnuts are easily recognizable since they are generally three in every chestnut husk and they are the fruit of the wild chestnut tree; they are different especially in size and shape.
The flat, not rounded, chestnuts are the ones in the middle of the chestnut husk. As goes with an ancient saying, of the three chestnut in a husk,one was appointed to the master, one to the farm worker and one to the poors.
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