Chestnuts: the Bread Tree : Though regarded mainly as a seasonal treat in America, the chestnut was vital sustenance year-round--indeed, a means of survival--for centuries in France and Italy.

“A matin castagne, a megiudi pestumi, a seira castagnon.”

(“In the morning, chestnuts; at midday, chestnut crumbs; in the evening, dried chestnuts.”)

--Saying from Triora, in the western Ligurian mountains

*

Chestnuts roasting on an open fire are one of the commonplaces of the season--even in Southern California, where the open fire, December or not, might well be mesquite in the Weber.

The smell of chestnuts cooking in blackened iron pans over braziers on the streets of Paris is an emblem of that city at this time of year. Marrons glaces and other chestnut-based confections tend to show up on our tables, if they show up at all, only around the holidays. To us, in other words, the chestnut is pretty much a wintertime treat and not much else.

For centuries, though, in the back-country behind the French and Italian Rivieras, the chestnut was vital sustenance--as basic and essential to the local diet as, say, the date was to the Bedouin or the potato to the Irish.

In earlier, harsher times, they say, when famine visited the region, villages that grew chestnut trees survived, while those that did not were decimated. In the interior of Liguria, as elsewhere in northern Italy, the chestnut was known as l’albero del pane--the bread tree--both because bread could be made from chestnut flour and because it was, sometimes literally (its wood being as valuable as its fruit), the staff of life.

Chestnuts were eaten fresh, either boiled or roasted or stewed in milk or wine. Dried, they went into soups or were reconstituted by steeping in water with fennel flowers and salt--the water blackens and this yields a Genoese expression for a treacherous person or affair, caeu cumme l’aegua de ballettu, “dark like chestnut water”--or were popped plain into the mouth and chewed, like caramels.

They were also, in Italy more than in France, ground into flour. This was used not only to make bread (usually, but not always, in combination with white flour), but also for noodles and gnocchi, as a polenta-like gruel to be eaten with fresh cheese and as porridge. Chestnut batter was also fried into frittelle or fritters and made into the flat pasta cakes known as testaroli.

In addition, chestnut wood has long been used in the region to make tools, barrels and furniture. It was also raised in the hills above Genoa, between the 16th and 19th centuries, specifically to be turned into charcoal to fuel the many ferrerie or ironworks around Liguria that were under Genoese control.

In the early 19th century, in the Nicois back-country (where Isola is the chestnut capital, and towns like Le Moulinet and Coaraze have annual celebrations of the tree and its fruit), there was even a French government inquiry into the possibility of making sugar from chestnuts. This apparently proved impractical--but the chestnut does, indirectly, provide another sweetener on both sides of the border: chestnut honey. This is an unusual and quite delicious product, not very sweet at all but rich and full-bodied, with a pleasant bitterness.

The chestnut harvest begins in Liguria around mid-October and lasts for about two weeks. It is followed by a second harvest--of the dried chestnut leaves, which are used as winter bedding for cows. The traditional method of processing chestnuts was labor-intensive, and, perforce, a community project. Ten or 12 pounds of chestnuts at a time were placed in heavy sacks, then the sacks were laid out on the ground and two people beat each one with chestnut-wood staves to crack the shells--striking exactly 40 blows (some say 42) apiece, according to the farmers in one village I visited, for fewer won’t do the job and more will crush the meat as well as the shells.

Next, the chestnuts were taken to a free-standing building called a seccatoio, or drying place (seccaeso in Genovese). Here they were spread out on an elevated alderwood grill, high above a slow fire of chestnut, alderwood or dried heather roots, and smoke-dried for hours, as farmers and their friends and neighbors waited patiently, gossiping and eating. (That the process was frustratingly slow may be gleaned from the term for chestnut-drying, seccatura, which is also slang for nuisance or tedium.)

After the chestnuts had dried, everyone gathered around to shell them and pick them over. The wormy or rotten ones were set aside for the pigs, and the rest were either stored in dried form or sent to a mill to be turned into flour. (According to an anonymous booklet called “Per Selve, per Campi: La Vegetazione tra Natura e Storia,” published in Varese Ligure, there was also a method of conserving chestnuts for many months in a fresh state--but, notes the text, “The secret . . . is one that some people know but nobody will reveal.”)

Chestnut trees grow wild and cultivated in the Val di Vara, which stretches westward from Varese Ligure, inland from Sestri Levante in eastern Liguria. (The wild ones produce smaller fruit, it is said, but are more resistant to disease.) In one local village alone, Cassego, there were once seven mills producing chestnut flour. Now there’s only one in the whole region, on the road to Sestri Levante--and even that is temporarily closed as I write this, pending the imposition of updated hygiene regulations by the Italian government, at the prompting of the EEC.

The Val di Vara is the only major valley in the Ligurian interior, east or west, that runs parallel to the sea rather than perpendicular to it--and it looks very different from the rest. Typically, the valleys are narrow, with steep, terraced walls. Here, the landscape is gentler, more rounded, with crops growing in high meadows instead of on near-vertical terraces. Pale-hued houses seemed specially illuminated against the still-green hills when I visited the region in late October, and the woods and orchards had an autumnal glow. If there had been a few red barns and white church steeples, it could almost have been Connecticut or Pennsylvania.

I was in the Val di Vara to attend Cassego’s modest Sagra di Castagne, or Chestnut Festival. The event was inaugurated in 1975 by the village priest, Don Sandro Lagomarsini--who is also a student of local history, customs and folklore and the curator of a tiny museum of peasant life behind his church. The sagra draws a few visitors from Genoa or Sestri Levante--Lagomarsini is a well-known character, with friends in academic and gastronomic circles all over eastern Liguria--but remains primarily a local affair.

The festivities began, inevitably, with Mass at Don Sandro’s little church. This was followed by a communal lunch, innocent of chestnuts, at the diocesan vacation house on a nearby hill.

Here, I sat down in a large hall, at a long table covered with a throwaway plastic red-and-white-checked tablecloth, with about 150 celebrants, for a hearty meal of polenta with meat sauce, roast veal with roasted potatoes, quail in a dark red wine sauce, good bread, unmarked bottles of local white wine, squares of delicious locally made cow’s milk cheese (which everyone ate with their hands) and then pieces of plain, dryish cake and mixed-fruit tart washed down with sparkling young red wine.

After lunch, an accordionist began to play inside and a guitarist outside; a few youngsters danced, and a few played soccer in the parking lot, in the crisp but sunny afternoon; a few hard cases remained at the tables, finishing the wine; and the mayor gave an address in another room on the possibility of obtaining EEC funds for the restoration of Cassego’s church.

Then everyone decamped and reassembled in a vacant roadside lot just down the hill from the church. Here, literally thousands of chestnuts were boiling atop small, circular cast-iron stoves or roasting in long-handled pans with perforated bottoms over bonfires of beechwood and chestnut. There was also a stand dispensing cheese, tortes both sweet and salted, raw chestnuts, wine and soft drinks. These cost money, but the chestnuts were free and in generous supply, and Don Sandra walked through the crowd with a box of them in his hands, as if to make sure that everybody got enough.

The citizens of Cassego and their friends, meanwhile, just sort of stood around talking and nibbling and talking some more until the light had faded. Then they all went home.

DRIED CHESTNUT SOUP (Bouillon de Chataignes)

When he was growing up in Lantosque, in the arriere-pays or back-country about 30 miles north of Nice, remembers chef Franck Cerutti, many of the houses in the village had attics with roof holes for ventilation. When it was chestnut-drying time, though, the holes would be closed, chestnuts would be laid out on the attic floors and fires would be lit in the fireplaces. Smoke would leak into the attics and slowly dry the fruit. “The attics were always black,” he recalls. Cerutti serves this refinement of a traditional chestnut soup in his excellent restaurant, Don Camillo, just off the Cours Saleya in Nice.

1/2 pound dried chestnuts

1 stalk celery

1/2 bulb fennel

1 bay leaf

Salt

1 cup whipping cream

2 tablespoons butter

Freshly ground black pepper

1/4 cup fresh ricotta

Extra-virgin olive oil

Flaked sea salt

Soak chestnuts in bowl of warm water for about 30 minutes to loosen skins, then pull skins off. Soak chestnuts in bowl of cold water for 48 hours.

Drain chestnuts and transfer to soup pot. Add celery, fennel and bay leaf and enough salted water to cover. Bring to boil, then reduce heat and simmer, covered, for 1 1/2 hours. Remove celery, fennel and bay leaf, then puree chestnuts and cooking water in food processor or blender, adding more warm water if necessry to obtain medium-thick but fluid soup.

Return soup to pot, stir in cream and butter, and season to taste with salt and pepper. Mash ricotta into soup. Ladle soup into wide, flat bowls, drizzle with little olive oil and scatter pinch of sea salt on top.

Makes 4 servings.

Each serving contains about:

444 calories; 262 mg sodium; 106 mg cholesterol; 34 grams fat; 30 grams carbohydrates; 5 grams protein; 1.02 grams fiber.

CHESTNUT GNOCCHI WITH PINE NUT SAUCE (Cornetti)

Cornetti are a specialty of the picturesque Valle Argentina, extending inland from Arma di Taggioa and Taggia, almost to the French border near the town of La Brigue. The simple pine nut sauce is a typical condiment in the interior, especially in winter, when--in the days before greenhouse basil, at least--it was a substitute for pesto. Traditionally, the gnocchi are shaped by tearing off a piece of dough about the size of a grape, then rolling it between your hands into a twig-like shape about 1 1/2 inches long and finally giving each twig a twist. We found this overworked the dough too much, giving a tough texture, so we made this adaptation.

1/2 pound chestnut flour

3/4 flour

Salt

1 cup pine nuts

Extra-virgin olive oil

Grated Parmigiano-Reggiano

Mix chestnut flour with all but about 1/2 cup flour in large bowl, then mix in about 1 teaspoon salt. Gradually add about 2 cups water to flour, first stirring with whisk and then working by hand to form pliant but firm dough. Add bit more water if necessary. (Dust hands and work surface with bit of additional flour so dough doesn’t stick.) Allow dough to sit, covered with clean towel, for about 1/2 hour.

Spread remaining flour out on pastry board or other work surface. Working as quickly as possible, roll piece of dough into shape about size of raisin, then place on floured surface. (After dusting with flour, gnocchi can be placed on top of one another.) When all gnocchi are made, set aside for about 1/2 hour.

Crush pine nuts with mortar and pestle or in food processor, being careful not to overwork--nuts should not become smooth paste. Pour in thin stream of olive oil and stir vigorously to obtain thick but fluid sauce. Add salt to taste, then work in about 2 tablespoons Parmigiano-Reggiano.

Cook gnocchi in plenty of boiling salted water until done--about 4 or 5 minutes. Drain thoroughly, then toss gently but thoroughly with sauce and additional Parmigiano-Reggiano to taste. Serve immediately.

Makes 4 servings.

Each serving contains about:

563 calories; 655 mg sodium; 2 mg cholesterol; 30 grams fat; 65 grams carbohydrates; 17 grams protein; 1.52 grams fiber.