Chestnut is never simply a chestnut. Anyone who has gone foraging for chestnuts and carelessly bitten into a conker by mistake will know that only too well.
Admittedly ‘Dwarf chestnuts roasting on an open fire’ doesn’t really have the same ring to it but if Mel Tormé and Bob Wells, the American songwriters behind ‘The Christmas Song’ first made famous by Nat King Cole, could have been bothered to be botanically correct with their lyrics that’s what we’d hear when it’s played to death every December. Then again since it was supposedly written in the middle of the scorching summer of 1944, I suppose I shouldn’t be expecting authenticity and attention to detail.
All of which should tell you that chestnut is never simply a chestnut. Anyone who has gone foraging for chestnuts and carelessly bitten into a conker by mistake will know that only too well. Cheesy Christmas songs aside we’ve never given as much time to the chestnut as the Continental Europeans where, in Italy and France in particular, large cultivated chestnuts that produce only a single large brown nut, as opposed to the two to four small nuts found in the wild variety, are a luxury ingredient.
Wild British chestnuts are in season from late September to December but are at their best in late October and early November when they fall in large numbers and are fully ripe. The fruit of the European ‘sweet’ or Spanish chestnut tree is actually of Asian origin and was brought to Europe by the Greeks. The Spanish connection comes from the fact that the best chestnuts brought into Britain originally came from Spain.
Over in the States where Tormé and Wells saccharine hit was composed a blight killed off their best chestnuts in the early 20th century and now they cultivate mostly Chinese chestnuts with the only native variety being the aforementioned ‘Dwarf’ – sometimes called by its Native American name chinquapin - which Nat King Cole would probably have had trouble getting his tongue around should it have ever made the final lyrics.
Back foraging in Britain you should search for dark brown nuts and avoid paler specimens, which are unripe and will quickly shrivel. You should likewise avoid any wrinkled nuts, as they tend to have a bitter taste. Obviously bad nuts will also have an acrid smell to them. You should hang your wild chestnuts in a netted bag in a cool dry place for a couple of days which will allow some of their plentiful supply of starch to convert to sugar thereby giving you a much sweeter nut.