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If I’d ever spared a thought for how chestnuts – the sweet, edible kind, not the combative horsey sort – were harvested, I would probably have conjured rosy-cheeked peasants bent low in ancient forests and filling rough-hewn hessian sacks by hand. Back-breaking labour, sure, but so picturesque!
I was delighted, therefore, while on a writing retreat in Umbria last month, to get the opportunity to watch an elderly couple manoeuvre a giant vacuum around their haphazard orchard, followed by their furious sheepdog. The fallen crop was sucked into a giant fan that spat their bristly jackets back out on to the ground, and the nuts then went to be sorted by other family members on a conveyor belt in the barn – the good ones to be sold in the shell, the less perfect specimens swiftly dropped into a bucket for processing.
Later in the week, a lorry turned up in the village square to pick up bags from other small local producers, and that evening I roasted a pan of chestnuts on the fire with new appreciation, while loudly bemoaning the disappearance from the streets of London of the chestnut sellers of my childhood (though this makes me sound positively Dickensian, I can confirm that I’m talking about this century. Note also that Nigel Slater is less starry-eyed on the subject.)
If you’ve never eaten chestnuts hot from the shell – or if, like me, it’s been a while since you’ve done so – I urge you to seek them out, even just once. The vacuum-packed, ready-cooked and peeled sort are, of course, extremely convenient, and ideal for the likes of Jacob Kenedy’s grandmother’s braised quail with chestnuts, or his dad’s boozy montebianco dessert, but they’re a quite different beast from the sweetly smoky, roasted variety, so fresh that you scald your fingers on them and don’t care. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has some sage advice (and a sagey chestnut stuffing recipe) on the subject from 2006, and I doubt much has changed in that department in the past 20 years.
Though the season’s over by then, the nut’s association with Christmas means that net bags of chestnuts have already made their annual appearance in greengrocers and supermarkets, no doubt as much for their decorative value as their fibre content. My editor has yet to be convinced of the chestnut’s merits – mealy, he says. And, indeed, they were once an important subsistence starch in hilly regions such as Umbria and Tuscany, where to this day the ground nuts pop up in cakes (OK, this one’s Ligurian) and cookies (such as Giuseppe Dell’Anno’s castagnotti, pictured top), pasta (Giorgio Locatelli has a lovely sounding recipe with wild mushrooms), breads and soups (such as this Rachel Roddy number). But I’d argue that any such tendency to powderiness is, like so many issues in life, helped by the liberal addition of fat, as proved by Yotam Ottolenghi’s buttery chestnut frangipane tart, Angela Hartnett’s smoky bacon and ricotta fettuccine and Rachel’s buttery rice with pumpkin and sage.
As a one-woman chestnut marketing board for Britain, I hope this tempting selection makes it clear that the chestnut is not just for Christmas. Even Nigel’s inspired sausage and sauerkraut take from 2022 or Yotam’s satisfyingly named stuffing muffins from 2017 would work with a roast chicken or an equally seasonal game bird such as Blanche Vaughan’s pot-roast pheasant.
So, if you spot some chestnuts at the shops this weekend, hoover them up. Hessian sack and sheepdog entirely optional.
My week in food
Prime cuts | I’m sorry to report that the burger at chef Jackson Boxer’s Notting Hill outpost, Dove, is as glorious as rumours suggest. Sorry because, as it’s made with the offcuts from their 50-day-aged bavette steak, there are only a limited number available per service, and when they’re gone, they’re gone. Book for the first sitting, get there early and order it immediately. Juicy, fatty and intensely beefy, it really is that good.
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Cool beans | Or, perhaps, the best ratio of effort to pleasure: jarred cannellini beans tossed with Marmite butter, then served on toasted sourdough and topped with grated cheddar. The Food Foundation has launched Bang in Some Beans, a campaign backed by the likes of Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall to double UK bean consumption by 2028 – though they’re good for both us and the planet, two-thirds of the population eat less than a single portion per week. Not me, though. I love them.
All the food that’s fit to print | As someone who came of age in the last glory days of print, I’m delighted by its recent renaissance in the world of food. We may have lost Delicious magazine this year, but we’ve gained an occasional print version of Vittles, while the Pit team recently produced perhaps my favourite issue yet, on American food, featuring Uyen Luu on Vietnamese diaspora cooking in California, Chiara Arellano on the Black Panthers’ breakfast clubs and Annie Cheng on the history of Mississippi Delta cuisine. There’s also a recipe for my beloved deep-dish pizza, among others. You, too, can order it here.
Dinner party inspiration | I’m throwing a dinner party in tribute to the late and much-missed Jilly Cooper this week, so I very much enjoyed digging into the archives for inspiration: this admission, from a 2002 interview about her beloved local pub, the Bear Inn in Bisley, Gloucestershire, furnished me with the starter: “They know that I’m permanently on a diet, so they will do eggs, lettuce and carrots for me specially.” Just add a pleasingly 1980s avocado dip (no doubt too much naughty cholesterol for Jilly) and it’s a fine prelude to coq (up) au vin and a sloe gin-infused fruit salad (apparently the only pudding in Jilly’s repertoire, and described by literary agent Felicity Blunt as a “truly lethal … truth serum”). Rest in raucous peace, Jilly. We will be raising a glass to you.
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