Chestnuts. Rain. High and low brown

Travel

26 Oct

The pond has turned the color of weak cocoa: a milky brown framed by the acid green and gold of autumn’s changing leaves. This from a flush of rainwater changing the pond’s summer chemistry. The ducks make swirls and ripples on its glossy surface. A kingfisher has recently haunted the pond’s banks. He whirs in with his flash of blue and clattering repetitive caw dizzying the placid ducks. It’s a moment of stirring the pot. Patterns, ingredients and appetites are changing with the weather.

With visiting friends, I drove across the valley in the mizzle to gather a bucketful of chestnuts from a nearby orchard. I have an obsessive passion for chestnuts. There is something deeply satisfying about them despite, or because of, the difficulty with which you ‘get to’ the meat of them. First we had to pick them up off the ground, and dislodge them from their spikey casings. They look and feel like sea urchins. You use a booted foot to squash the husk open, then retrieve the polished brown nuts from inside. Ideally they need to be cured for a few weeks. Then you cut a cross into their skin and roast them until they are slightly charred on the outside. You sit and peel them next, removing all the terribly tannic inner skin. Finally there is a significant morsel of nutty, chewy, sometimes fruity, sometimes meaty, chestnut. I can sit and peel and eat them for hours.

Chestnuts represent a major source of starchy nutrition from a tree. This is special, and overlooked except by permaculture circles and the wisdom of peasant culture. Other tree nuts are higher in fat and generally smaller. Chestnuts are a perennial source of starch, unlike wheat or potatoes, requiring little maintenance once planted, they can feed you for decades. Though it is associated with hard times, in Italy they dry and mill chestnuts into flour to make a cake, pasta and bread.

It’s odd because I associate them with luxury. They are, culturally, both high and low, akin, in this sense, to oysters. The flavor and texture and richness of their flesh evokes exotic spices like clove, allspice and mace, some deeper cheese flavors or roast pork fat, wild mushrooms, and sweet or savory caramelization. All without any treatment other than roasting! Then think of Maron Glacé, each nut painstakingly saturated in sugar syrup tuning it into a glossy translucent brown confection. In contrast, the Italian Castagnaccio (cake) is held with affection but is (albeit dotted with lovely rosemary) rather dense, heavy, gray going to actually eat. Chestnut soup strikes a good balance of elegance, richness and wholesome simplicity. Despite our prejudices and predilections, the trees keep producing this beautiful food crop. We would do well to enjoy it in whatever way suits our fancy.

If I’ve troubled to roast and peel chestnuts I’m simply going to eat them up right away rather than make them into something else; but now and then it’s entirely worth the $10 or so to buy a pre-peeled, vacuum-packed handful of chestnuts and make a soup, or in the appropriate season (say, Christmas) the following Alsatian Braised Cabbage. It is a gorgeous, lavish, almost aristocratic way of dealing with an otherwise pedestrian vegetable — the purple cabbage. I love all vegetables, however a five pound purple cabbage can balk the best of cooks. It is good in slaw, perhaps borscht, but its propensity to turn everything purple is not endearing. I associate it with hippy food, along with tamari sunflower seeds, slabs of tempeh and carob chips. This dish elevates the cabbage to tiara-on-a-purple-satin-cushion status. (Which is not to say a hippy slaw with tamari sunflower seeds and crispy shards of tempeh might not also be delicious!)

Alsatian Braised Cabbage

Red onion sautéed in:

Duck fat. Once the onions are softened add the:

Purple cabbage sliced in ribbons and cut across for a manageable bitesize.

Salt and pepper. Add a few:

Juniper berries. Then the:

Chestnuts (roasted or boiled and peeled) whole or broken up slightly.

Red Wine vinegar, a good slosh to deglaze the pan, cook off the fumes and add water or stock to come halfway up the side of the volume of cabbage and braise gently for about an hour.

Prunes soaked in Armagnac are added about half an hour before the end of the cooking. All will be a rich purple red and look beautiful next to roast meat, orange squash or anything green.