December 25, 2019 • 24 mins
This tree nut helped make civilizations in North America possible — and is now practically extinct in the region. Anney and Lauren explore why the chestnut is so useful, why it was nearly lost here, and what's being done to bring it back.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:07):
Hello, and welcome to Savor Protection of I Heart Radio
and Stuff Media. I'm Anneries and I'm Lauren vocal Baum
and today we're talking about chestnuts. Yes, tis the season
for chestnuts. It is. Yeah. Yeah, that Nat King Cole
song was a was a favorite on the holiday rotation
in my house growing up. My main association with it
(00:28):
is it from the Show's Supernatural, which did a Christmas
episode way back in their second season, which they're in
their fifteen season out. You guys, so uh they have
that song and they're like, it's really dark because it's
a scary show and there's violent Santa and it's playing
that song. Really stuck with me. Oh that's yeah, I
can see. Yeah, I'm making a feast that no one. Anyway,
(00:49):
I love that I watched every Christmas, but the actual
food I do not have a lot of experience with. No.
The first time I had chest nuts was actually, I
think too years ago when I was in Japan and
it was October, and I remember because there was a
lot of fun Halloween stuff. Yeah, and I was in
this huge, huge, sprawling market in Kyoto. There are all
(01:11):
kinds of foods and snacks and roasted chestnuts were everywhere everywhere,
so I tried one. I was like, okay, oh it
was good. Yeah. It's actually one of the very very
very few foods that I'm not fond of, particularly like
they taste to like ploying and rich to me, Like
there's like a sweetness and a richness. It's like too much.
(01:34):
My brain is like, do not want um? Yeah? I
don't know either, uh I yeah. My my parents we
we literally roasted some over an open fire when I
was um and I was like, what is this crap? Um?
Like five year old me was not having it? Um.
And yeah, as as an adult, I've tried some snacks
especially yeah, like I think Japanese snacks that have some
(01:55):
in it, and I've been like no, no, my. Although
I did have a dish of Frabbi only over at
the Porter Beer Bar and a little five points anyone
familiar with Atlanta that were filled with a chestnut mixture
and those were fine, sounds good. I mean it was
also with like shaved brussel spreads and cranberries. It was
like hard to go that I love, you know, I
(02:18):
want to try them again. I'm curious if I would
like to try them in the us and whatever people
are doing around Christmas time. I want to know what
that's about. Yeah, I'm willing, I'm willing. I'm willing to try.
I'm willing to try. I don't like it when I
don't like food because I want to like everything I
want to eat. I'm the same. But okay, let's get
(02:39):
to your question. Oh yeah, chestnuts, what are they? Well?
Chest nuts are they name of both a few species
of a temperate deciduous trees and their nuts in the
genus castania um. The four major species are the European
which is cis of tiva, the Chinese which is ce
(03:00):
mal sima, the Japanese which is C. Cranada, and the
American which is C. Dentata. And yeah, these trees can
vary in height from like thirty to a hundred feet,
which is around nine to thirty with these oblong leaves
that come to a sharp point and have serrated edges,
and they can live for hundreds of years. And this
nut is our first true nut? What right? Oh my god,
(03:25):
we should have ban faire hearty so so so I
so I really officially looked it up to try to
get my head around this and the definition of true
nut is that it's it's like a fruit and seed
combo unit that comes in a hard and generally inedible
shell that does not open on its own. Oh no, no, never,
um okay, So chestnuts grow like this. The trees put
(03:48):
off these small clusters of flowers in the late spring
or early summer, and the female flowers will usually be
clustered together in groups of three, surrounded by a sort
of capsule of of these tiny bracts, which are which
are stiff little flower bits. Yeah, and when the flowers
are fertilized, those three flowers will start growing into three
(04:09):
individual nuts um each each each creamy white with a
chocolate brown husk and shaped sort of like cloves of garlic. Meanwhile,
that spiny capsule grows with them, forming the spiky green
sheath or or burr. And when they're mature, the bars
open and dropped to the ground or sometimes just drop
the nuts. I have to say, when I saw a
(04:32):
picture of this, I laughed aloud because I was like,
why did it? We name it dentata? And I saw
the picture and it made sense and I laughed and
I laughed at laugh Okay, I see you, yeah, yeah,
Because they're they're they're very spiky, they're they're very toothy looking.
They are, yeah, a little bit, a little bit monstrous. Um.
(04:53):
But so once once you get this nut okay to
eat it, you're gonna you're gonna want to cook it somehow.
But uh, in order to do that, you're going to
cut a slit or an x in the husk and
then generally boil or roast them until the flesh is
tender and the husk is soft enough to be peeled off,
and the flesh will be this creamy yellow, something like
the texture of a cooked potato. Um. The flavor is
(05:14):
rich and sweet and earthy. And yeah, they're They're used
in both savory and sweet dishes. They can be ground
into a flower for soups or desserts, mashed up and
fried like doughnuts, made into pures for pastry fillings, or
added to any number of dishes for a boost of
that sweet richness than some people apparently enjoy. Um. And
those trees themselves are a hardwood that that wood has
(05:35):
been used for construction and ornamentation pretty much everywhere they
grow around the world. Um and uh, and that wood
contains a lot of tannin which once extracted, is key
in the processing of leather of tanning. Yeah, the wood
has also been used to make paper, very very much useful,
a lot of things to do. What about the nutrition, Yes,
(05:57):
where a food show weird um Wise, chestnuts have a
macronutrient profile more like a grain than most other culinary nuts. Um,
like by caloric intake, they're like carbohydrate um. But they
still have like double the protein of most grains and
alway less fat than most nuts. So yeah, fun weird
little in between category that they fill. They've they've also
(06:19):
gotten excellent smattering of vitamins and minerals comparable to some
fresh fruits or vegetables. So yeah, like they're a little
bit carb heavy, but especially paired with a bit more
protein um and other types of plant stuff, they will
totally fill you up and keep you going and give
your body all that stuff that it needs to you
know body. He right hey chestnuts, Yeah right, good on you.
(06:41):
We do have some numbers for you. The U s
makes up less than one percent of global production. Most
of the fresh chestnuts sold in the US are imported
from China, Korea, and Italy. The yearly value of chestnuts
imported into the US is estimated to be around twenty
million dollars. The chestnut is sometimes used in the place
of potatoes and dishes around the world. In Africa, Europe, Asia,
(07:02):
the French call high quality chestnuts and candy them. I'm
interested in that these days, most of American chestnut consumption
does happen around the holidays, either roasted over an open
fire or as an addition to stuffan slash. Dressing and
spottings of chestnut trees in the wild make national news
for good reasons that we will get into. Will um
(07:25):
so rare are old chestnut trees that they are named,
like when people find them, they get a name. Oh wow, yes,
like this is Bob. I hope there's a Bob out there.
The American Chestnut Foundation labels them as technically extinct. But yeah,
that was not always the case at all. Oh, certainly not.
And we will get into that after we get back
(07:46):
from a quick break for a word from our sponsor,
and we're back. Thank you sponsored, Yes, thank you. So
chestnuts are old. Oh yeah, they're old. They're they're not new. Yeah,
as in up there with the first foods eaten by humans.
(08:07):
Insert that old chestnut here. Old chestnuts. Yeah, they were
one of the first domesticated crops see sativa. Probably originated
in Europe and probably specifically in Greece and or possibly China.
You know, one of those five thousand year old Chinese
poetry mentioned chestnuts, and remains of chestnuts have been found
(08:28):
from one thousand years prior to that. In areas of
the Mediterranean where grain growing proved difficult, chestnuts were a
fantastic option. Yeah, the ancient Romans spread them throughout their empire,
and also there's evidence from Japan dating back to a
little bit later on about one thousand Sea some records
indicate that street vendors were selling rosted chestnuts by the
(08:49):
sixteenth century Sea in Rome. Jumping ahead and then see
dn Tata. The American variety of the chestnut tree was
known to Native Americans long before European immigrants arrived. They
boiled the leaves down for medicinal purposes, and when the
Europeans did arrive, they discovered just so many chestnut groves everywhere. Yes,
(09:10):
at one time the entire eastern coast of the United
States was rife with chestnut trees. Several accounts exist of
people living in regions with plentiful chestnut trees, and they
tell people who wrote of chestnuts helping them get through
tough times. A lot of these nuts were open anybody
to forage, and plenty of them. Yeah. One quote mountain
(09:31):
woman said, a grove of chestnuts is a better provider
than I. A man easier to have around too, like
this mountain woman. Other accounts claimed that in some forest
during chestnuts season, inches of chestnuts accumulated. People made use
of them in puddings, ground them up into flour for
cakes and breads. Are just eight and plain old roasted.
(09:53):
They were fed to pigs and cows and believed to
impart superior taste to the meat. The wood was preferred
by woodwork is for crafts and log cabins, and many
a main square was shaded by chestnut trees. Over one
thousand places in the Appalachia had chestnuts in the name.
In some parts of that region, chestnuts were used as currency.
Children called chestnuts shoe money because at the start of
(10:15):
school year, children got their nuts together to buy shoes. Yeah.
Some historians sometimes informally dubbed roasted chestnuts as America's first
fast food. Imagine that they were also a popular tree
with horticulturists. Thomas Jefferson experimented with graphs of American and
European chestnuts at Monticello in seventeen seventy three, just for example.
(10:40):
But uh yeah, other folks were bringing in other varieties
um throughout the eighteen hundreds, and this led to the
creation and propagation of a lot of varietals up through
the early nineteen hundreds. With the advent of steamboats and
completion of railroads in the eighteen sixties, Kentucky was able
to sell some of their plentiful chestnuts. They were available
in jem stores through door to door salespeople. At its
(11:03):
height in nineteen fourteen, Virginia's cash crop supply of chestnuts
was over two million pounds. And this brings us to
a huge event in America's chestnut history, blight. The blights
blights Japanese chestnut trees carrying fungus spread. This fungus spread,
and it eventually nearly eradicated the American chestnut tree population,
(11:24):
which at the time numbered around four billion. The infection
might have set in earlier in the eighteen nineties, but
it wasn't reported on until nineteen o four. Um. Yeah,
It was first described by employees at the Bronx Zoo,
so it's sometimes reported to have come from there and
then in nineteen o four, but it's more likely that
(11:44):
a number of trees were brought into various areas in
the Northeast with the infection. Right. This fungus attached to
animal fur and bird feathers and ale of chestnuts. To
one written anecdote from the time, advised that you had
to get through the tree, the chestnut tree before the
turkeys do if you want to get your hands on
some chestnuts. Point being, they helped spread it far and
(12:06):
ride this fungus. Yeah. And the way the way that
this blight works is that the fungus creates a lot
of exalic acid, which which eats away at the trees
enough to let the fungus in to to feed and
grow in the trees tissue, which which causes these these
cankers that kill everything around them and prevent any part
(12:27):
of the tree above the infection line from you know,
getting nutrients from the roots, uh and effectively leaving you
with a stump um. New shoots will grow from those stumps,
forming the sort of like sad shrub that's also vulnerable
to the fungus um. But yeah, it prevents the tree
from really growing or or producing nuts. By the nineteen tens,
state commissions were formed around this issue. These commissions pushed
(12:50):
farmers to chop down trees plagued by blight. A paper
out of Honsdale, Pennsylvania implored woodman burrown that tree spare
not a single bow. The Boy Scouts got involved in
several states has with searching forest for blighted trees and
the hopes of creating a blight free zone, but all
of these initiatives proved unsuccessful. In the nineteen twenties, the
Bismarck Daily Tribune reported efforts to stop the spread of
(13:13):
this bark disease have been given up four hundred million dollars.
That was the value the paper estimated the trees were
worth ten years ten years earlier. Yeah. The Daily Tribune
wrote that this amounted to the loss of a conspicuous
and beautiful feature of the landscape in this country, and
went on to limit schoolboys of the future who read
the poem of the village Blacksmith will ask what is
(13:35):
a chestnut tree? And the poem in reference is won
by longfellow also of note, this was especially devastating because
it coincided with the Great Depression. A North Carolina lumberman
wrote in the nineteen thirties, Certainly nothing could be more
in sightly than the gaunt and naked trunks of these
dead trees, standing like skeletons in every vista which the
eye turns. The U. S Department of Agriculture began trying
(13:58):
to develop a resistant chestnut hybrid the nineteen thirties, but
despite decades of trying, they were unable to find a
solution and shut down in the nineties. Yeah, eighties of
the chestnut trees located in the Great Smoky Mountains had
died off. By nineteen forty. Just a few groves in
California and the Pacific Northwest survived. With the arrival of
(14:20):
the nineteen fifties, most of our chestnut tree population was gone.
Botanists call this one of the greatest botanical disasters in
our history. Someone who grew up in Kentucky during that
time wrote, I thought the whole world was going to die. Yeah.
This was a hugely important product for food, for shelter,
for income, and it was just gone. Wow. Yeah, but
(14:45):
let's start it around. Yeah, what about that connection to
the holidays, Annie, Well, Lauren, it's light. No. Chestnuts do
ripen in the Thanksgiving to Christmas season. Yeah? Yeah, they
bloom late spring, early summer, ripe in fault to early winter, right,
(15:07):
and papers would depict train cars full of them rolling
into big cities just in time for the holiday season.
The Christmas song Chestnuts Posting over an open Fire debuted
in the twenty century with that classic line. Nat King
Cole was the first to make it famous in it
was actually written by Meltormat. Well, there you go, there
you go. Chestnuts have played a role in other Christian
(15:28):
traditions before this. On the feast of St. Martin's Day
they were given to the poor as a representation of sustenance,
and in Tuscany they were eaten for St Simon's Day.
A wedding tradition on Corsica calls for chestnuts prepared twenty
two different ways at a wedding feast. I would love
to hear more about this any listeners experience. Early Christians
thought that chestnuts were symbolic of chastity. Okay, yeah. The
(15:52):
American Chestnut Foundation was founded in three with a mission
of restoring the American chestnut population to its former number.
There were six thousand members by nine and that year
they started a breeding program. Corn geneticist Charles Burnham, reading
about the shutdown of the US government hybrid program we
mentioned earlier, realized they'd made a major misstep in ignoring
(16:14):
back crossing. So scientists in the US haven't given up
on the chestnut tree. You know. They're experimenting with breeding
American and resistant to blight Chinese chestnut trees and then
crossing the resulting specimen with pure American chestnut trees. Some
scientists are working on sequencing the DNA of American chestnut
trees and the blight. Yeah, and one of the ideas
(16:36):
that's come out of that research is that we could
genetically engineer American chestnut trees that essentially d weaponize this
fungus by by creating an enzyme that breaks down that
xalic acid that the fungus produces. And so, Yeah, and
they've successfully created trees like this. The gene responsible for
creating the enzyme comes from bread wheat. Researchers have been
(16:57):
working on this since nine um, but it's only being
seriously considered for distribution like in the wild this year. Um,
and it is to be fair really tangly topic attempting
to reforest with a genetically modified organism. But but the
researchers say that the modified trees don't harm local bees
or helpful fungi or tadpoles, so it looks good maybe.
(17:23):
Uh and yeah, they can't just introduce um, those blite
resistant genes from the Chinese chestnuts into the American chestnuts
because it's like a whole suite of genes. It's not
like a couple of jeans that you could just be
like boop boop. Um. It's a whole tangled wet it is.
Another tactic being steadied involves infecting trees with a virus
(17:45):
that could potentially kill the blaze. Yeah, I know, it
feels like a good backfire built the Okay. Five blite
resistant American chestnut trees were planted in two thousand eight
and two thousand nine. Scientists are also interested in the
chestnut trees ability to sequester your carbon ac side and
reclaim coal land. Yeah. I've read that a lot of
land that was previously used for strip mining. Um chestnut
(18:07):
trees would be a particularly good use of the nutrients
that are still in that soil and in restoring that
land to something usable. Yeah, I had no idea. I
had no idea. This blew my mind that they these
trees used to be everywhere, Yeah, Eastern Eastern score certainly,
(18:29):
like like they were never very populous outside of the East,
but just gone, just gone. And I've always kind of
wondered about it because the line in that song, I
would think, they're everywhere? Yeah, why why is that even
in the song? Why what? And now it makes so
much more sense, Uh, sad. And I got bummed out
(18:51):
about the guy when he was like children in the
next generation won't know, won't know? Yeah, yeah, And I mean,
and they sound like glorious trees, they do. And the
and I was like one of the small rabbit holes
that I pulled myself out of, was was about woodworking,
some of the woodwork in houses from the turn of
(19:12):
the twentieth century. Uh, and how common chestnut hardwood floors
and and other fixtures were, and how like that's a
really good sign that a house is from before a
certain point, because after that point. Yep, yep, this has
been a happy holiday episode. You're welcome everyone. Fascinating stuff though,
(19:38):
Oh gosh, yeah, and I'm sure there's a lot more.
I because I didn't know this was such a huge
event American history. I'm sure there's a lot more when
it comes to Japan and China other places than the US. Yeah,
they're also grown in Korea, and it sounds like there's
a lot of really interesting information about like Eastern Europe.
But yeah, we kind of focused it on this because
we're like, oh wait, disaster and there's so tree sources
(20:00):
on it, so many papers written about it. So now
you know if you didn't before. Uh, same for me.
Lessons always learning. Um, yeah, that's about what we have
to say with the chestnut. We do have a little
bit more for you, but first we've got one more
quick break for a word from our sponsor, and we're back.
(20:26):
Thank you sponsors, Yes, thank you, And we're back with listen.
It's hard to do, Matt king Cole with the listener mails.
We gave it the old College dry William wrote. Just
got done listening to the Coffee Cast, and as always
(20:48):
it was awesome. As a trucker, coffee is kind of
life blood. Keeps me going with my unpredictable sleep schedule.
I go in for some good stuff, often ordering single source,
organic and fair trade coffee online from small independent roaster,
and have a percolator, espresso maker and a Moca pot
on board the rig to make like you know, Fatty Joe's,
I make some awesome coffee drinks on the truck. One day,
(21:10):
I needed an especially strong brew after a rough night
with limited sleep, and made a sugarless salted caramel fat
latte with about five shots of espresso and a nice filmy. Unfortunately,
when I got out of the truck to check my
refer unit, my dog Gerbil, managed to get the lid
off my copy mug and helped herself to quite a
large portion of my latte. Oh no, I now know
(21:31):
what a dog might look like when going all breaking bad.
I practically had to peel the little monster off the
ceiling for the next three hundred miles managed to get
a pick of her while she was all tweaked out
on caffeine. I now I have a copy mug with
a screw top lid, also including a pick of a
recent addition to the truck, because I know you all did.
Critters had an unplanned conceit when I found a baby
(21:51):
cat in the bumper of the truck. Well, my dog
doing a morning breachip. Her name is Bumper and he
did send pictures and they are adorable. Oh yes, and
I love this coffee set up on your truck right. Gosh,
that's fancier than I have in my house. I have
in my house aspirations. Yes, Gen wrote while listening to
(22:13):
your episode on s car Go today, I was instantly
brought back to my two thousand seven tripped to Morocco,
where snails are a common dish. My first encounter with
them was in the Soux in Fez, where they are
sold live like in this crawling mass in one massive market.
Amidst the hundreds of stalls and the monkey and sneak candlers,
there's a row of half a dozen little stands, all
(22:34):
selling snails boiled in broth. Snails are sold in little
bowls with a little bit of broth, and you sit
at stools around the kiosk, a very hot dog stand
kind of vibe. You eat the snails by pulling the
meati bits out with a toothpick. There's quite a bit
of meat in there. I found the taste quite similar
to muscles or clams, with perhaps a more earthy and
less oceany flavor. Of course, the broth is a big
contributor to the taste, but the simple preparation really allows
(22:57):
you to taste the genuine flavor of the snails. I've
never had proper French s cargo, but we used to
sell it at the semi fancy grocery store I worked
at in university, and it always looked like a nauseating
amount of butter in there. I would highly suggest trying
the boiled snails if you ever get the chance. Morocco
has some other amazing dishes. To Jeanne Pastia, I think
that's how you pronounce it, which is a meat pie,
(23:19):
she says, dusted with a sugar incinamon and sometimes made
with pigeon mint tea. And of course the endless suits
filled with every type of food imaginable, including camel meat.
Worthy of another podcast trip perhaps, Yes, let's go right now, Okay,
good bye, I'm trip. She also sent pictures and they
(23:39):
were great, fantastic, so many snails. Thanks to both of
those listeners for writing to us. If you would like
to write to us, we would love to hear from you.
Our email is Hello at Sabor pod dot com. We're
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(24:00):
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Thank you, as always to her super producers Dylan Fagin
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hope that lots more good things are coming your way.
Hello, and welcome to Savor Protection of I Heart Radio
and Stuff Media. I'm Anneries and I'm Lauren vocal Baum
and today we're talking about chestnuts. Yes, tis the season
for chestnuts. It is. Yeah. Yeah, that Nat King Cole
song was a was a favorite on the holiday rotation
in my house growing up. My main association with it
(00:28):
is it from the Show's Supernatural, which did a Christmas
episode way back in their second season, which they're in
their fifteen season out. You guys, so uh they have
that song and they're like, it's really dark because it's
a scary show and there's violent Santa and it's playing
that song. Really stuck with me. Oh that's yeah, I
can see. Yeah, I'm making a feast that no one. Anyway,
(00:49):
I love that I watched every Christmas, but the actual
food I do not have a lot of experience with. No.
The first time I had chest nuts was actually, I
think too years ago when I was in Japan and
it was October, and I remember because there was a
lot of fun Halloween stuff. Yeah, and I was in
this huge, huge, sprawling market in Kyoto. There are all
(01:11):
kinds of foods and snacks and roasted chestnuts were everywhere everywhere,
so I tried one. I was like, okay, oh it
was good. Yeah. It's actually one of the very very
very few foods that I'm not fond of, particularly like
they taste to like ploying and rich to me, Like
there's like a sweetness and a richness. It's like too much.
(01:34):
My brain is like, do not want um? Yeah? I
don't know either, uh I yeah. My my parents we
we literally roasted some over an open fire when I
was um and I was like, what is this crap? Um?
Like five year old me was not having it? Um.
And yeah, as as an adult, I've tried some snacks
especially yeah, like I think Japanese snacks that have some
(01:55):
in it, and I've been like no, no, my. Although
I did have a dish of Frabbi only over at
the Porter Beer Bar and a little five points anyone
familiar with Atlanta that were filled with a chestnut mixture
and those were fine, sounds good. I mean it was
also with like shaved brussel spreads and cranberries. It was
like hard to go that I love, you know, I
(02:18):
want to try them again. I'm curious if I would
like to try them in the us and whatever people
are doing around Christmas time. I want to know what
that's about. Yeah, I'm willing, I'm willing. I'm willing to try.
I'm willing to try. I don't like it when I
don't like food because I want to like everything I
want to eat. I'm the same. But okay, let's get
(02:39):
to your question. Oh yeah, chestnuts, what are they? Well?
Chest nuts are they name of both a few species
of a temperate deciduous trees and their nuts in the
genus castania um. The four major species are the European
which is cis of tiva, the Chinese which is ce
(03:00):
mal sima, the Japanese which is C. Cranada, and the
American which is C. Dentata. And yeah, these trees can
vary in height from like thirty to a hundred feet,
which is around nine to thirty with these oblong leaves
that come to a sharp point and have serrated edges,
and they can live for hundreds of years. And this
nut is our first true nut? What right? Oh my god,
(03:25):
we should have ban faire hearty so so so I
so I really officially looked it up to try to
get my head around this and the definition of true
nut is that it's it's like a fruit and seed
combo unit that comes in a hard and generally inedible
shell that does not open on its own. Oh no, no, never,
um okay, So chestnuts grow like this. The trees put
(03:48):
off these small clusters of flowers in the late spring
or early summer, and the female flowers will usually be
clustered together in groups of three, surrounded by a sort
of capsule of of these tiny bracts, which are which
are stiff little flower bits. Yeah, and when the flowers
are fertilized, those three flowers will start growing into three
(04:09):
individual nuts um each each each creamy white with a
chocolate brown husk and shaped sort of like cloves of garlic. Meanwhile,
that spiny capsule grows with them, forming the spiky green
sheath or or burr. And when they're mature, the bars
open and dropped to the ground or sometimes just drop
the nuts. I have to say, when I saw a
(04:32):
picture of this, I laughed aloud because I was like,
why did it? We name it dentata? And I saw
the picture and it made sense and I laughed and
I laughed at laugh Okay, I see you, yeah, yeah,
Because they're they're they're very spiky, they're they're very toothy looking.
They are, yeah, a little bit, a little bit monstrous. Um.
(04:53):
But so once once you get this nut okay to
eat it, you're gonna you're gonna want to cook it somehow.
But uh, in order to do that, you're going to
cut a slit or an x in the husk and
then generally boil or roast them until the flesh is
tender and the husk is soft enough to be peeled off,
and the flesh will be this creamy yellow, something like
the texture of a cooked potato. Um. The flavor is
(05:14):
rich and sweet and earthy. And yeah, they're They're used
in both savory and sweet dishes. They can be ground
into a flower for soups or desserts, mashed up and
fried like doughnuts, made into pures for pastry fillings, or
added to any number of dishes for a boost of
that sweet richness than some people apparently enjoy. Um. And
those trees themselves are a hardwood that that wood has
(05:35):
been used for construction and ornamentation pretty much everywhere they
grow around the world. Um and uh, and that wood
contains a lot of tannin which once extracted, is key
in the processing of leather of tanning. Yeah, the wood
has also been used to make paper, very very much useful,
a lot of things to do. What about the nutrition, Yes,
(05:57):
where a food show weird um Wise, chestnuts have a
macronutrient profile more like a grain than most other culinary nuts. Um,
like by caloric intake, they're like carbohydrate um. But they
still have like double the protein of most grains and
alway less fat than most nuts. So yeah, fun weird
little in between category that they fill. They've they've also
(06:19):
gotten excellent smattering of vitamins and minerals comparable to some
fresh fruits or vegetables. So yeah, like they're a little
bit carb heavy, but especially paired with a bit more
protein um and other types of plant stuff, they will
totally fill you up and keep you going and give
your body all that stuff that it needs to you
know body. He right hey chestnuts, Yeah right, good on you.
(06:41):
We do have some numbers for you. The U s
makes up less than one percent of global production. Most
of the fresh chestnuts sold in the US are imported
from China, Korea, and Italy. The yearly value of chestnuts
imported into the US is estimated to be around twenty
million dollars. The chestnut is sometimes used in the place
of potatoes and dishes around the world. In Africa, Europe, Asia,
(07:02):
the French call high quality chestnuts and candy them. I'm
interested in that these days, most of American chestnut consumption
does happen around the holidays, either roasted over an open
fire or as an addition to stuffan slash. Dressing and
spottings of chestnut trees in the wild make national news
for good reasons that we will get into. Will um
(07:25):
so rare are old chestnut trees that they are named,
like when people find them, they get a name. Oh wow, yes,
like this is Bob. I hope there's a Bob out there.
The American Chestnut Foundation labels them as technically extinct. But yeah,
that was not always the case at all. Oh, certainly not.
And we will get into that after we get back
(07:46):
from a quick break for a word from our sponsor,
and we're back. Thank you sponsored, Yes, thank you. So
chestnuts are old. Oh yeah, they're old. They're they're not new. Yeah,
as in up there with the first foods eaten by humans.
(08:07):
Insert that old chestnut here. Old chestnuts. Yeah, they were
one of the first domesticated crops see sativa. Probably originated
in Europe and probably specifically in Greece and or possibly China.
You know, one of those five thousand year old Chinese
poetry mentioned chestnuts, and remains of chestnuts have been found
(08:28):
from one thousand years prior to that. In areas of
the Mediterranean where grain growing proved difficult, chestnuts were a
fantastic option. Yeah, the ancient Romans spread them throughout their empire,
and also there's evidence from Japan dating back to a
little bit later on about one thousand Sea some records
indicate that street vendors were selling rosted chestnuts by the
(08:49):
sixteenth century Sea in Rome. Jumping ahead and then see
dn Tata. The American variety of the chestnut tree was
known to Native Americans long before European immigrants arrived. They
boiled the leaves down for medicinal purposes, and when the
Europeans did arrive, they discovered just so many chestnut groves everywhere. Yes,
(09:10):
at one time the entire eastern coast of the United
States was rife with chestnut trees. Several accounts exist of
people living in regions with plentiful chestnut trees, and they
tell people who wrote of chestnuts helping them get through
tough times. A lot of these nuts were open anybody
to forage, and plenty of them. Yeah. One quote mountain
(09:31):
woman said, a grove of chestnuts is a better provider
than I. A man easier to have around too, like
this mountain woman. Other accounts claimed that in some forest
during chestnuts season, inches of chestnuts accumulated. People made use
of them in puddings, ground them up into flour for
cakes and breads. Are just eight and plain old roasted.
(09:53):
They were fed to pigs and cows and believed to
impart superior taste to the meat. The wood was preferred
by woodwork is for crafts and log cabins, and many
a main square was shaded by chestnut trees. Over one
thousand places in the Appalachia had chestnuts in the name.
In some parts of that region, chestnuts were used as currency.
Children called chestnuts shoe money because at the start of
(10:15):
school year, children got their nuts together to buy shoes. Yeah.
Some historians sometimes informally dubbed roasted chestnuts as America's first
fast food. Imagine that they were also a popular tree
with horticulturists. Thomas Jefferson experimented with graphs of American and
European chestnuts at Monticello in seventeen seventy three, just for example.
(10:40):
But uh yeah, other folks were bringing in other varieties
um throughout the eighteen hundreds, and this led to the
creation and propagation of a lot of varietals up through
the early nineteen hundreds. With the advent of steamboats and
completion of railroads in the eighteen sixties, Kentucky was able
to sell some of their plentiful chestnuts. They were available
in jem stores through door to door salespeople. At its
(11:03):
height in nineteen fourteen, Virginia's cash crop supply of chestnuts
was over two million pounds. And this brings us to
a huge event in America's chestnut history, blight. The blights
blights Japanese chestnut trees carrying fungus spread. This fungus spread,
and it eventually nearly eradicated the American chestnut tree population,
(11:24):
which at the time numbered around four billion. The infection
might have set in earlier in the eighteen nineties, but
it wasn't reported on until nineteen o four. Um. Yeah,
It was first described by employees at the Bronx Zoo,
so it's sometimes reported to have come from there and
then in nineteen o four, but it's more likely that
(11:44):
a number of trees were brought into various areas in
the Northeast with the infection. Right. This fungus attached to
animal fur and bird feathers and ale of chestnuts. To
one written anecdote from the time, advised that you had
to get through the tree, the chestnut tree before the
turkeys do if you want to get your hands on
some chestnuts. Point being, they helped spread it far and
(12:06):
ride this fungus. Yeah. And the way the way that
this blight works is that the fungus creates a lot
of exalic acid, which which eats away at the trees
enough to let the fungus in to to feed and
grow in the trees tissue, which which causes these these
cankers that kill everything around them and prevent any part
(12:27):
of the tree above the infection line from you know,
getting nutrients from the roots, uh and effectively leaving you
with a stump um. New shoots will grow from those stumps,
forming the sort of like sad shrub that's also vulnerable
to the fungus um. But yeah, it prevents the tree
from really growing or or producing nuts. By the nineteen tens,
state commissions were formed around this issue. These commissions pushed
(12:50):
farmers to chop down trees plagued by blight. A paper
out of Honsdale, Pennsylvania implored woodman burrown that tree spare
not a single bow. The Boy Scouts got involved in
several states has with searching forest for blighted trees and
the hopes of creating a blight free zone, but all
of these initiatives proved unsuccessful. In the nineteen twenties, the
Bismarck Daily Tribune reported efforts to stop the spread of
(13:13):
this bark disease have been given up four hundred million dollars.
That was the value the paper estimated the trees were
worth ten years ten years earlier. Yeah. The Daily Tribune
wrote that this amounted to the loss of a conspicuous
and beautiful feature of the landscape in this country, and
went on to limit schoolboys of the future who read
the poem of the village Blacksmith will ask what is
(13:35):
a chestnut tree? And the poem in reference is won
by longfellow also of note, this was especially devastating because
it coincided with the Great Depression. A North Carolina lumberman
wrote in the nineteen thirties, Certainly nothing could be more
in sightly than the gaunt and naked trunks of these
dead trees, standing like skeletons in every vista which the
eye turns. The U. S Department of Agriculture began trying
(13:58):
to develop a resistant chestnut hybrid the nineteen thirties, but
despite decades of trying, they were unable to find a
solution and shut down in the nineties. Yeah, eighties of
the chestnut trees located in the Great Smoky Mountains had
died off. By nineteen forty. Just a few groves in
California and the Pacific Northwest survived. With the arrival of
(14:20):
the nineteen fifties, most of our chestnut tree population was gone.
Botanists call this one of the greatest botanical disasters in
our history. Someone who grew up in Kentucky during that
time wrote, I thought the whole world was going to die. Yeah.
This was a hugely important product for food, for shelter,
for income, and it was just gone. Wow. Yeah, but
(14:45):
let's start it around. Yeah, what about that connection to
the holidays, Annie, Well, Lauren, it's light. No. Chestnuts do
ripen in the Thanksgiving to Christmas season. Yeah? Yeah, they
bloom late spring, early summer, ripe in fault to early winter, right,
(15:07):
and papers would depict train cars full of them rolling
into big cities just in time for the holiday season.
The Christmas song Chestnuts Posting over an open Fire debuted
in the twenty century with that classic line. Nat King
Cole was the first to make it famous in it
was actually written by Meltormat. Well, there you go, there
you go. Chestnuts have played a role in other Christian
(15:28):
traditions before this. On the feast of St. Martin's Day
they were given to the poor as a representation of sustenance,
and in Tuscany they were eaten for St Simon's Day.
A wedding tradition on Corsica calls for chestnuts prepared twenty
two different ways at a wedding feast. I would love
to hear more about this any listeners experience. Early Christians
thought that chestnuts were symbolic of chastity. Okay, yeah. The
(15:52):
American Chestnut Foundation was founded in three with a mission
of restoring the American chestnut population to its former number.
There were six thousand members by nine and that year
they started a breeding program. Corn geneticist Charles Burnham, reading
about the shutdown of the US government hybrid program we
mentioned earlier, realized they'd made a major misstep in ignoring
(16:14):
back crossing. So scientists in the US haven't given up
on the chestnut tree. You know. They're experimenting with breeding
American and resistant to blight Chinese chestnut trees and then
crossing the resulting specimen with pure American chestnut trees. Some
scientists are working on sequencing the DNA of American chestnut
trees and the blight. Yeah, and one of the ideas
(16:36):
that's come out of that research is that we could
genetically engineer American chestnut trees that essentially d weaponize this
fungus by by creating an enzyme that breaks down that
xalic acid that the fungus produces. And so, Yeah, and
they've successfully created trees like this. The gene responsible for
creating the enzyme comes from bread wheat. Researchers have been
(16:57):
working on this since nine um, but it's only being
seriously considered for distribution like in the wild this year. Um,
and it is to be fair really tangly topic attempting
to reforest with a genetically modified organism. But but the
researchers say that the modified trees don't harm local bees
or helpful fungi or tadpoles, so it looks good maybe.
(17:23):
Uh and yeah, they can't just introduce um, those blite
resistant genes from the Chinese chestnuts into the American chestnuts
because it's like a whole suite of genes. It's not
like a couple of jeans that you could just be
like boop boop. Um. It's a whole tangled wet it is.
Another tactic being steadied involves infecting trees with a virus
(17:45):
that could potentially kill the blaze. Yeah, I know, it
feels like a good backfire built the Okay. Five blite
resistant American chestnut trees were planted in two thousand eight
and two thousand nine. Scientists are also interested in the
chestnut trees ability to sequester your carbon ac side and
reclaim coal land. Yeah. I've read that a lot of
land that was previously used for strip mining. Um chestnut
(18:07):
trees would be a particularly good use of the nutrients
that are still in that soil and in restoring that
land to something usable. Yeah, I had no idea. I
had no idea. This blew my mind that they these
trees used to be everywhere, Yeah, Eastern Eastern score certainly,
(18:29):
like like they were never very populous outside of the East,
but just gone, just gone. And I've always kind of
wondered about it because the line in that song, I
would think, they're everywhere? Yeah, why why is that even
in the song? Why what? And now it makes so
much more sense, Uh, sad. And I got bummed out
(18:51):
about the guy when he was like children in the
next generation won't know, won't know? Yeah, yeah, And I mean,
and they sound like glorious trees, they do. And the
and I was like one of the small rabbit holes
that I pulled myself out of, was was about woodworking,
some of the woodwork in houses from the turn of
(19:12):
the twentieth century. Uh, and how common chestnut hardwood floors
and and other fixtures were, and how like that's a
really good sign that a house is from before a
certain point, because after that point. Yep, yep, this has
been a happy holiday episode. You're welcome everyone. Fascinating stuff though,
(19:38):
Oh gosh, yeah, and I'm sure there's a lot more.
I because I didn't know this was such a huge
event American history. I'm sure there's a lot more when
it comes to Japan and China other places than the US. Yeah,
they're also grown in Korea, and it sounds like there's
a lot of really interesting information about like Eastern Europe.
But yeah, we kind of focused it on this because
we're like, oh wait, disaster and there's so tree sources
(20:00):
on it, so many papers written about it. So now
you know if you didn't before. Uh, same for me.
Lessons always learning. Um, yeah, that's about what we have
to say with the chestnut. We do have a little
bit more for you, but first we've got one more
quick break for a word from our sponsor, and we're back.
(20:26):
Thank you sponsors, Yes, thank you, And we're back with listen.
It's hard to do, Matt king Cole with the listener mails.
We gave it the old College dry William wrote. Just
got done listening to the Coffee Cast, and as always
(20:48):
it was awesome. As a trucker, coffee is kind of
life blood. Keeps me going with my unpredictable sleep schedule.
I go in for some good stuff, often ordering single source,
organic and fair trade coffee online from small independent roaster,
and have a percolator, espresso maker and a Moca pot
on board the rig to make like you know, Fatty Joe's,
I make some awesome coffee drinks on the truck. One day,
(21:10):
I needed an especially strong brew after a rough night
with limited sleep, and made a sugarless salted caramel fat
latte with about five shots of espresso and a nice filmy. Unfortunately,
when I got out of the truck to check my
refer unit, my dog Gerbil, managed to get the lid
off my copy mug and helped herself to quite a
large portion of my latte. Oh no, I now know
(21:31):
what a dog might look like when going all breaking bad.
I practically had to peel the little monster off the
ceiling for the next three hundred miles managed to get
a pick of her while she was all tweaked out
on caffeine. I now I have a copy mug with
a screw top lid, also including a pick of a
recent addition to the truck, because I know you all did.
Critters had an unplanned conceit when I found a baby
(21:51):
cat in the bumper of the truck. Well, my dog
doing a morning breachip. Her name is Bumper and he
did send pictures and they are adorable. Oh yes, and
I love this coffee set up on your truck right. Gosh,
that's fancier than I have in my house. I have
in my house aspirations. Yes, Gen wrote while listening to
(22:13):
your episode on s car Go today, I was instantly
brought back to my two thousand seven tripped to Morocco,
where snails are a common dish. My first encounter with
them was in the Soux in Fez, where they are
sold live like in this crawling mass in one massive market.
Amidst the hundreds of stalls and the monkey and sneak candlers,
there's a row of half a dozen little stands, all
(22:34):
selling snails boiled in broth. Snails are sold in little
bowls with a little bit of broth, and you sit
at stools around the kiosk, a very hot dog stand
kind of vibe. You eat the snails by pulling the
meati bits out with a toothpick. There's quite a bit
of meat in there. I found the taste quite similar
to muscles or clams, with perhaps a more earthy and
less oceany flavor. Of course, the broth is a big
contributor to the taste, but the simple preparation really allows
(22:57):
you to taste the genuine flavor of the snails. I've
never had proper French s cargo, but we used to
sell it at the semi fancy grocery store I worked
at in university, and it always looked like a nauseating
amount of butter in there. I would highly suggest trying
the boiled snails if you ever get the chance. Morocco
has some other amazing dishes. To Jeanne Pastia, I think
that's how you pronounce it, which is a meat pie,
(23:19):
she says, dusted with a sugar incinamon and sometimes made
with pigeon mint tea. And of course the endless suits
filled with every type of food imaginable, including camel meat.
Worthy of another podcast trip perhaps, Yes, let's go right now, Okay,
good bye, I'm trip. She also sent pictures and they
(23:39):
were great, fantastic, so many snails. Thanks to both of
those listeners for writing to us. If you would like
to write to us, we would love to hear from you.
Our email is Hello at Sabor pod dot com. We're
also on social media. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter,
and Instagram at saber pod and yes, we do hope
to hear from you. So Favor is a production of
(24:00):
I Heart Radio and Stuff Media. For more podcasts from
My Heart Radio, you can visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Thank you, as always to her super producers Dylan Fagin
and Andrew Howard. Thanks to you for listening, and we
hope that lots more good things are coming your way.
Savor News
Hosts And Creators
Anney Reese
Lauren Vogelbaum
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