Would a winter celebration really be complete without sweet chestnuts roasting on an open fire? Here we take a closer look at humanity's relationship with Castanea sativa (Europe's sweet chestnut) covering...
- The Chestnuts of Mount Olympus
- The Bread Tree
- Roman Britain and Sweet Chestnuts
- The Chestnut Festivals of Europe
- Folk Remedies and Scientific Prospects
- The Chestnut of the Hundred Horses
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| Sweet chestnuts have served as a foodstuff for thousands of years... (Hansjörg Keller) |
The Chestnuts of Mount OlympusThe scientific name for the sweet chestnut is Castanea sativa - which references the town of Castonis in Thessaly, Greece. The ancient Greeks of Castonis are thought to have grown groves of these trees and dedicated them to Zeus, leader of the Greek gods. It's said that Mount Olympus (a real mountain used as the home of the gods in Greek mythology) had a large number of chestnut groves growing on and around it!
Perhaps that's why (although the term was normally used for walnuts) sweet chestnuts were sometimes referred to as "dios balanos" or "the acorn of Zeus."
The Bread Tree
Sweet chestnuts have long served as a foodstuff - they can be used in nut loaf, stuffing, cakes or simply roasted to turn them into a traditional Christmas snack... but in the mountains of Italy, they were once a lifeline.
In Lunigiana, Tuscany, sweet chestnuts are sometimes called the bread tree. For centuries, the locals maintained the groves of chestnut trees throughout the year, before cleaning them and harvesting them in the autumn. Everyone would pitch in, gathering the nuts and taking them to a gradile - a two-story building that acted like a giant smoker, with the chestnuts placed in racks on the top floor while a fire burned on the bottom floor. Families would maintain a vigil over the fire, with young ladies in particular receiving suitors during their portion of the watch - and if a suitor proved undesirable, she'd toss damp wood on the fire to produce heavy smoke and "invite" the suitor to leave.
Once dried, the nuts still needed to be shelled - and one method used was the men, women and children performing the baladura - basically holding each other's shoulders and dancing over the chestnuts in wooden clogs. The product could then be sifted, sorted and ground to chestnut flour!
Italian folklore also deals with the origin of the sweet chestnut - for example, one local legend goes that the residents of a mountain village experienced a dreadful famine, and begged the heavens for a miracle. Their prayer was answered in the form of the chestnut tree... but hell had been listening as well, and encased the nuts in burrs of sharp spines. Once again, the villagers prayed for help - and heaven caused the chestnut shells to crack open in the shape of a cross when they were ready to eat.
Given their role as a reliable autumn crop and counter to starvation, sweet chestnuts have sometimes been viewed as a symbol of abundance and longevity. Tangentially, they've also been considered to have a magical connection to fertility in humans!
Going back in time, it turns out that the Romans were partial to chestnuts as well. One dish from that era consisted of boiled and mashed chestnuts with honey, vinegar, olive oil, saltpeter, herbs, spices and garum (fish sauce.)
Sweet chestnuts can also be used as an ingredient when brewing beer (Corsica is seems to be the key place for this) though it seems reviewers are not convinced it added much to the final product.
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| Sweet chestnut spines can be nasty - I don't recommend putting one in your pocket! (Jez Timms) |
Roman Britain and Sweet Chestnuts
There's a long standing belief in Britain that sweet chestnuts were imported by the Romans, with the occupying legions storing chestnut caches in their forts for emergency rations. It turns out that this may have been something of an invention, as the only confirmed find of Roman-era sweet chestnuts discovered in Britain is the peelings of five (yes, merely five) nuts from an Roman farmstead in Essex.
The peelings were found alongside the remains of other exotic foods (olives, stone pine nuts and Mediterranean fish) which implies that the chestnuts were probably imported as a luxury. Researchers are stilly trying to determine when and why sweet chestnuts came to Britain, but the oldest one found to date is less than 400 years old.
The Chestnut Festivals of Europe
While chestnuts are a fairly common winter novelty food in Europe, some countries dedicate entire festivals to this versatile nut.
Northern Spain has Magosto, an autumn celebration linked to Samhain (precursor to Halloween.) It's a simple affair, with friends and family gathering round fires to roast chestnuts, drink young wine and tell each other elaborate tales that may have roots in true stories. Similar festivals include Catalonia's La Castanyada, a celebration held on All Saint's Day and focusing on warming winter foods. Common dishes include the archetypical chestnuts and panellets - sweets made from almonds, sugar and pine nuts.
Italy (especially the Tuscan mountains) has a variety of chestnut festivals as well, such as the Crastatone. In case you were wondering, the name is derived from a Tuscan dialect word crastare, which means to score chestnuts before roasting them. It's derived from the Latin castrāre (i.e. castrate!)
France is also no stranger to the chestnut, with various towns holding celebrations in autumn. Collobrières in the Massif des Maures mountains holds an annual festival, which it links to the people of Maures using chestnuts as a staple crop for centuries. Alternatively, there's Les Castagnades - multiple chestnut festivals held in several towns throughout the Monts d'Ardèche Regional Natural Park.
Hungary's also a fan of chestnuts, with celebrations like Berényi Gesztenye Fesztivál in Iharosberény and Velemi Gesztenyenapok being held in Iharosberény and Velem respectively. Historically, roasted chestnuts were given to those tolling the bells for the dead on All Saints' Day as well.
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| Roasted sweet chestnuts can be a warming winter snack... (Nomad Productions) |
Folk Remedies and Scientific Prospects
Interestingly, it's not just the nuts of the sweet chestnut that have beneficial properties. Leaves of the tree have been a long-standing folk remedy, and modern research suggests indicates that other components may have some real medical potential.
In folk medicine, medicines made of chestnut leaves have been used for everything from asthma to cough, cold, bronchitis, expectorating, and bronchial conditions. On to modern research, and a study conducted in 2013 found that sweet chestnut bark had beneficial effects on guinea pigs, with the results suggesting antioxidant activity and a potential cardioprotective effect - basically, increasing the resistance of your cells to damage from "free radicals" and helping keep your heart healthy. The wood's also shown promise as an antispasmodic (good for gut trouble) and may be useful against certain viruses.
The Chestnut of the Hundred Horses
Finally, let's take a look at the king of the sweet chestnuts. Located in Sicily on the slopes of Mount Etna, Castagno dei Cento Cavalli (the Chestnut of the Hundred Horses) is over a thousand years old (one study suggests that it may be around 2,200.) With age comes size, and it held the Guinness record for the greatest tree girth (the distance around the trunk) ever when measured in 1780, clocking in at an mighty 57.9m. The trunk has since spilt into a number of spaller trunks, all connected to the same root system.So how did the tree earn its name? Well, legend has it that Queen Joan of Aragon and her hunting party (consisting of one-hundred knights) were able to shelter beneath its branches overnight to escape a perilous storm!
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