The Tree That Made Bread

On the first properly cold evening of the year, somewhere in a European city, a man appears on a street corner with a drum of fire and a bag of chestnuts, and something ancient briefly switches back on. You smell him before you see him — that unmistakable smell of chestnuts roasting, sweet and smoky and slightly singed, which cuts through cold air in a way that few smells manage. You were not hungry. You are now. You find yourself crossing the road, almost against your will, drawn to the small pool of warmth and light, to hand over some coins for a paper cone of hot chestnuts you did not know you wanted ten seconds ago.

And then, as always, you burn your fingers.

This is the chestnut’s opening move, and it never varies. The things come out of the roaster at approximately the temperature of the sun, and the paper cone does nothing to insulate them, so you spend the first few minutes juggling each one from hand to hand, blowing on it, swearing gently, peeling back the charred split shell with fingertips that are now both scalded and blackened, and getting, as your reward, perhaps half of them in good condition. The other half will be the ones that were secretly rotten, or rock-hard, or that disintegrate into bitter fragments the moment you breach the shell. The chestnut keeps its failures hidden until the last possible moment. It is not, in any sense, an easy food. And yet there is almost nothing I would rather eat on a cold street at dusk, hopping from foot to foot, burning my fingers, perfectly happy.

Before we go any further, a warning and a small act of botanical pedantry, because this is the one fruit on which getting it wrong could actually hurt you.

The chestnut you roast and eat — the sweet chestnut, Castanea sativa — has a close impostor, and the two are endlessly, dangerously confused. The horse chestnut, Aesculus hippocastanum, produces the glossy brown nut that British children know and cherish as the conker: that beautiful, polished, mahogany sphere that every child wants to eat because it looks exactly like something you should be able to eat. You cannot. The conker is mildly poisonous, and will reward anyone who tries it with a thoroughly bad stomach. The two trees are not even closely related, despite the shared name and the near-identical-looking nut — nature playing one of its crueller practical jokes.

The way to tell them apart, once you know, is clear enough. The edible sweet chestnut comes several together inside a fiercely spiky green case, like a small furious hedgehog, and each nut is flattish on one side with a little tufted point and a tassel at the tip. The inedible conker sits alone or in pairs inside a leathery, warty case with only a few blunt spikes, and the nut is round and smooth all over with no point and no tassel. Spiky case and pointy tasselled nut: dinner. Smooth case and round shiny nut: not dinner, whatever your inner six-year-old insists. I mention all this with some feeling, because the inner six-year-old is a persistent creature, and the conker really is extraordinarily appetising-looking, and the disappointment is both gustatory and spiritual. Back, though, to the chestnut that actually feeds you — because feed you it did, for a very long time, and far more seriously than a paper cone on a cold corner would suggest.

Here is the thing most people have forgotten about the chestnut: for whole regions of Europe, for centuries, it was not a treat at all. It was bread.

In the mountain areas where grain would not grow — where the soil was too thin, the slopes too steep, the altitude too high for wheat — the sweet chestnut was the staple carbohydrate, the thing that stood between a mountain population and starvation through the winter. The tree was known, in French, as l’arbre à pain: the bread tree. In the Cévennes and the Ardèche of France, in Corsica, across the Apennine spine of Italy, in Galicia and northern Portugal, in pockets of the Pyrenees and beyond, entire mountain economies were built on the chestnut. A mature tree could produce vast quantities of nuts year after year for centuries, with little tending, on ground that could grow almost nothing else. People didn’t just eat chestnuts in autumn; they dried them in special little stone-and-timber buildings over slow smoky fires for weeks, and then milled the dried nuts into flour, and that flour became the bread, the porridge, the polenta, the daily bulk of the mountain diet right through to spring.

This is the chestnut’s real history, and it is a history of poverty and endurance as much as of flavour. The bread tree fed the people the grain-growing lowlands looked down on. There is an old saying from the chestnut regions, in various forms, that the chestnut was the tree that let the mountains be lived in at all — and when, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the chestnut economy collapsed and the flour was abandoned in favour of cheap lowland wheat, it was often the signal for the mountains to empty, for the villages to be left to the old and then to no one. The retreat of the chestnut and the depopulation of the uplands are, in more than one region, the same story.

What the chestnut flour made is still, happily, with us, and it is worth seeking out, because it tastes of nothing else on earth — faintly sweet, a little smoky, dense, with a flavour people often reach for the word “autumnal” to describe because no more precise word exists.

In Tuscany it becomes castagnaccio, which is less a cake than a statement of intent: a flat, dense, dark, barely-sweet slab of chestnut flour and water, studded with pine nuts, raisins, and rosemary, with a cracked top like a dry riverbed. It is an acquired taste, and I will be honest that it acquired me only on the third attempt, but once acquired it is deeply moreish in its austere way. In the Garfagnana, the chestnut heartland of Tuscany, the flour also becomes necci — thin pancakes traditionally cooked between hot iron plates or flat stones, rolled around sweet ricotta. In Corsica the chestnut is practically the island’s soul: there is Corsican pulenta, which outside Corsica means maize polenta but here means a dense bread-like mass of chestnut flour, eaten in slabs with the local cured pork or a soft cheese; there are chestnut fritters, chestnut cakes, chestnut biscuits; there is even Corsican beer brewed with chestnut flour, which is better than it has any right to be. Across the Portuguese and Spanish mountains the chestnut turns up boiled, roasted, in soups, in stews with pork, in bread — the same ingenuity, the same dependence, the same deep regional pride.

And then, at the opposite social extreme, the very same nut becomes one of the most expensive sweets in the world.

The marron glacé — the candied chestnut — is the chestnut dressed for the opera. The process is famously laborious: whole peeled chestnuts, of the large single-nut variety the French call marron (as opposed to the smaller, multi-nut châtaigne), are candied painstakingly over many days, soaked in progressively more concentrated sugar syrup so slowly and gently that the nut sweetens all the way through without collapsing into mush. Get it slightly wrong and the whole batch disintegrates, which is a large part of why the things cost what they cost. The result is a glistening, impossibly rich, melt-in-the-mouth confection that has been a luxury of the French and Italian winter table for centuries, a thing of gilded boxes and Christmas and considerable expense.

Consider that for a moment. The same tree, the same nut, fed the poorest mountain villages their winter bread andsupplied the courts and the confectioners of Paris and Turin with one of their costliest delicacies. The bread of the starving and the sweetmeat of the rich, off a single branch. I find that one of the more remarkable facts in all of food — a reminder that “peasant” and “luxury” are very often just two different things done to the identical ingredient, separated only by labour, sugar, and who happened to be eating.

The chestnut also knows how to throw a party, and the autumn is thick with them. All across the chestnut regions, as the nuts come down, there are festivals — the sagra della castagna in village after village down the Italian peninsula, the magusto of northern Portugal and the magosto of Galicia, with their bonfires and their communal roastings and their new wine, the chestnut-roasting feasts that mark the turn deep into autumn across the whole of chestnut Europe. These are the harvest celebrations of the bread tree, the gathering-in of the thing that used to mean survival, now kept up as pleasure and memory and an excuse to stand around a fire in the cold with a cone of hot nuts and something to drink. The communal roasting, the shared warmth, the crowd around the brazier — it is the street-corner moment I started with, scaled up to a whole village, and it is one of the warmest things the European autumn does.

I should end, though, with a quieter note, because the chestnut is a tree in retreat, and it would be dishonest to write a cheerful hymn to it without saying so. The European chestnut has been battling for over a century against introduced diseases — ink disease, and the chestnut blight, Cryphonectria parasitica — that have killed trees across the continent. And across the Atlantic, the same blight did something close to unthinkable: the American chestnut, Castanea dentata, which once numbered in the billions and was one of the dominant trees of the entire eastern forest of North America — a giant, a keystone, the backbone of whole ecosystems and mountain economies — was, in the first half of the twentieth century, almost completely wiped out. An estimated three to four billion trees, gone, in a few decades, from a fungus accidentally imported on Asian nursery stock. It stands as one of the great ecological catastrophes in recorded history, the sudden erasure of a species that had defined a landscape, and most people alive today have never seen a mature American chestnut and never will. There are patient, decades-long breeding and engineering efforts underway to bring it back. They may yet succeed. It is slow, uncertain, hopeful work.

So the chestnut carries, under its homely roasted warmth, a genuine note of loss — the tree that fed the mountains and emptied them when it failed, the giant of the American woods struck down almost overnight, the bread of the poor that the modern world quietly set aside. It is, in its way, the most melancholy of the autumn foods, if you know its history. And also the most comforting, which is a combination the season rather specialises in.

Which is why I always stop at the brazier. The man with the drum of fire on the cold corner is the last living end of something enormous — a tree that fed millions, that built villages into the sides of mountains, that was bread and luxury and survival and festival all at once, and that is quietly slipping out of the modern diet the way it slipped out of the modern forest. I hand over my coins. I take my cone. I burn my fingers, as the chestnut requires. And I eat the good ones standing in the cold, warming my hands on the bad ones, briefly and gratefully in touch with every cold winter and every mountain village and every bread tree that ever got someone through to spring.

They are, even the burnt ones, even the rotten ones, worth the singed fingertips. The bread tree has earned that much.