Laura McCandlish for NPR
Forests filled with chestnuts once covered some 200 million acres of America. Thoreau called them the “boundless chestnut woods” and they stretched from Maine to Florida. As Oregon freelance writer Laura McCandlish says in an article published yesterday on the NPR website:
“Durable “cradle to coffin” chestnut timber built our communities, and our cuisine (particularly that of the Cherokee Indians, who revered this “bread tree”) relied on the starchy nutmeat. But by the mid-20th century, a fungal blight from Asia obliterated 4 billion of the indigenous East Coast trees. The American chestnut practically disappeared overnight.”
Due to that blight, McCandlish says most of the fresh chestnuts we roast during the holidays now come from Italy, China or Korea. But that’s changing — at least on a small scale.
American breeders have been working for decades to create blight resistant varieties of chestnuts and although there are obstacles to making American chestnuts as common as they once were, small orchardists are having success — even in the Northwest.
McCandlish says “here in the Northwest, organic, local chestnuts are for sale at farmers markets and food co-ops through December.”
Peggy Paul, Photo by Katherine Jones / Idaho Statesman
In Idaho, local chestnuts are available thanks, in part, to the “Chestnut Lady.” A profile in today’s Idaho Statesman attributes Peggy Paul (and her husband Jim) for planting a 500-tree chestnut orchard near Nampa about 15 years ago, creating the biggest chestnut farm in the Treasure Valley.
“We’re bringing them back,” says Peggy Paul, ” … so our children and our children’s children can talk about them.”
But how to prepare chestnuts? Both the NPR and Statesman articles offer recipes.
P.S. Rachael Daigle at the Boise Weekly tells me “the new City Peanut Shop on Bannock [in Boise] has been roasting chestnuts from Horseshoe Bend. They also plan to start roasting from a street cart in the near future.”
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Guy Hand is a writer, public radio producer and photographer specializing in food and agriculture. |
