Chestnuts Roasting

Not just a reference in a holiday carol, chestnuts are winter staples around the world, with a special place in Italian and Native American cuisine.

Every fall in the Calabrian hillsides of Italy, my cousin waits for chestnut trees in the mountains to drop treasured nuts into the nets below. In America, my father would drive to the local Italian market to procure a bag of chestnuts, carry it home, and drop it in my mother’s hands, expecting holiday miracles in her stuffings and desserts.

Chestnut trees have long existed as food sources across continents, including Europe, Asia, and the Americas. As a substitute for grains, chestnuts have provided sustenance as flours, pastes, and butters, and in cakes, breads, and stuffings.

In North America, Indigenous peoples honored chestnuts with each tribe offering its own word for the nut and the tree. The Onondaga tribe called them Oheya’da, the Powhatan, Opomens or Opommins, and the Catawba Yerupeh

The American chestnut, Castanea dentata,