The chestnut knife
Peeling chestnuts...a dear old recipe...a new face at the table...memories and old traditions entwine...
Above: The chestnut knife
Chère amie, cher ami,
The heart-shaped leaves of the Judas trees near the obelisk are turning yellow and brown; the young larches in the manège are lit up like slender golden torches. Glossy brown marrons, half-clad in spikey husks, lie scattered at the feet of the horse chestnuts along the path to the Orangerie. In the copses and hedgerows, only the native oaks of Normandy still hold fast to dry brown leaves. A few desiccated blackberries hang on thorny stems. But the sun brings a second life to the dying world, touching bare stems and dying leaves with a golden hue.
A November morning in the park, view of the copse on the east wing of the Chateau
“Marvelous!” my mother would have exclaimed. She loved coming out to Normandy. The majestic scale and light-filled beauty of the Chateau enchanted her.
She also loved this season, the season of Thanksgiving. Although she celebrated Christmas with faste and dutiful piety, perhaps a lingering childhood fear of being unworthy…of finding coal in the stocking, and lemons under the Christmas tree….lent too bright an edge to the holiday joy.
But Thanksgiving is not about one’s own personal merit. Or about the choice and perfect wrapping of presents. In its simplest form, it celebrates survival. It renders homage to the strength of human charity and the necessity of human bonds. With their gifts of food and local knowledge, the story goes, Squanto and his people saved the lives of Pilgrims.
On Thanksgiving, we celebrate the warmth of family union. We celebrate the New World of which we are part. There are no sugarplums or foie gras to give our foreign stomachs the collywobbles, but wholesome food of American origin… turkey, cranberries, potatoes and yams, pies made of pecans and pumpkin.
As usual, we spent Thanksgiving en famille. The girls and I were in the kitchen.
“Les femmes aux fourneaux?” asked one of my friends from Paris, who had called to wish me “un very ‘appy Merci-Donnant.”
“Women in the kitchen? Have a Happy Thanks-Giving! Isn’t it 2022? Et non 1621?” she added.
“Don’t the men help out?"
No, I thought to myself. I’m too fond of my own cooking.
The men made the fires in the chimneys. They carried wood. My husband organized one of his usual work parties. This year, with our sons, our sons-in-law, and three little ones, he started the construction of a gypsy wagon.
Meanwhile, I took out my mother’s time-honored recipe for “Creamed pearl onions.”
“I could, then I couldn’t” starts the typed message.
This cryptic invocation reflects the delicate nature of the dish.
The “oignons grelots,” so-named because the small shape and size of the onion recalls a jingle bell or “grelot,” must be had fresh, not frozen or canned. Highly prized for their gentle parfum and tender flesh, these onions only appear in small quantities once a year, in the fall. And peeling these onions is a tedious chore.
“Listen to a jazzy tune to speed you along,” recommended my mother in her missive.
To loosen the skins, you must plunge the little onions into boiling water, but not for too long or they will become mushy. After blanching, it is easy to pull off the papery outer layers. But gare! -- if too many layers pull away, then there isn’t much left on the tiny bulb.
After cooking the onions to a tender but firm stage, we make the sauce béchamel -- “a little butter, a little flour, and the reduced liquid” in which the peeled onions were cooked. A chef who came to us one summer taught me the secret of béchamel: wait for the butter and flour mixture to gently hiss and collect into a shiny dough that slips around the pan. Then add liquid. Cream goes into the mixture last and must be heated gently so that it does not boil and separate.
“Oignons à la crème” are “always tastier if they are done the day before,” continues the recipe. Once made, I set the creamed onions aside.
The pile of chestnuts was next. Peeling them is a task that also requires music and boiling water. It used to require painful pulling apart of the chestnuts with fingernails and a paring knife, but recently, I was delighted to come upon a short, curved blade chez le coutellier, the traveling knife salesman at the market.
The curved tip is ideal for scoring the tough outer coque and thin inner tan of the chestnut. I plunge the scored chestnuts into boiling water for a couple of minutes. This loosens the shell and inner skin from the savory marron inside. If they aren’t loose enough to peel easily, back into the pot they go. The peeled chestnut is called the “marron” even though it is not the fruit of the “marronnier,” the horse chestnut. It is called “marron,” apparently, because of the brown or “marron” coats of the Italian merchants who once brought chestnuts over the Alps to France.
Like the onions, the chestnuts are braised until tender but still firm. Then, they are stirred with chair de saucisse, ground pork sausage, that has been sautéed with a few onions and leaves of sage, thyme and bay. The farce will be stuffed into the cavity of the turkey with salt and pepper.
“Bonne fête d’action de grâce!” saluted our friend and neighbor Madame Chantal, stopping in to see how I was getting on with the bird. This translation of the Puritan feast of Thanksgiving, rather than the literal and merely transactional “merci-donnant,” accords with her religious sentiments.
“C’est épuisant!” she exclaimed, sighing contentedly and accepting a cup of tea. “Exhausting!”
Our friend raises chickens and other farmyard fowl. At the moment, she and her husband are deeply into the final stages of foie gras production. The geese and ducks must be force-fed three times a day with corn mash.
She has had to turn away the legions of friends and other would-be customers who want to buy her carefully nurtured turkeys and delicate foie gras for the saison des fêtes, but who waited too long to place their orders. We reserved our own turkey in May, when she bought the young chicks.
“Bien, vos marrons,” she commented, examining my heap of unpeeled chestnuts with a keen eye. Chantal is from Le Limousin towards the south, where chestnuts were once the main source of calories. She picked one up and tossed it in her hand.
“Nice and fresh,” she approved. The meat did not rattle as it would if the flesh were drying out.
Normandy is attached to the great wheat-producing plain of France, the most fertile and productive in Europe, and the source of French wealth for several thousand years. But below the Loire Valley to the south, in regions like the Limousin, the land is very different. Here are small plains, hills and valleys, mountain chains, dry déserts. Instead of vast wheat fields, there are pastures, orchards and vineyards. The soils of the small fields don’t produce much blé tendre, used for bread. For their own subsistence, les paysans in regions like the Limousin ate quantities of chestnuts, ground into flour or cooked into purées and cakes.
Chestnuts grow wild and rather sparsely in France. Developing the knowledge and skills to grow them productively took centuries. It was not until the trees that produce large “marrons” were imported from Italy in the 16th century that châtaigneraies, plantations of chestnuts, could support a growing population.
This map shows where the cultivated chestnut, Castanea sativa, is thought to have been carried from its ancient home in Asia Minor throughout the Mediterranean and into France by the First Century B.C.
In a famous memo written in 812, the Emperor Charlemagne ordered the improvement of his private domains. Article 70 of De Villis requires that the chestnut, among other fruit trees, be planted in all the imperial gardens. As Charlemagne’s empire comprised present-day France, as well as Germany, Croatia, and most of Italy, the culture of the chestnut became thoroughly established throughout Europe. If you were to drive directly west from the Chateaus for half a day, you might come upon one of these specimens. An immense chestnut tree, said to be 1,200 years old, spreads its gnarly limbs over Kerséoc’h, a farm in Pont-l’Abbé on the Finistère peninsula.
“Attention, Maman!” objected Edward, arriving à l’improviste to gather up refreshments for the work crew. “That chestnut could not have been planted on Charlemagne’s orders. He never conquered Brittany.”
Perhaps those independent Bretons, contemporaries of Charlemagne, had read the Greek and Roman treatises that inspired the emperor’s ambitious improvements, I replied.
Intended to help the country gentleman improve the pleasures and production of his estates, some of these manuals also dwell upon the virtues of the chestnut.
An “abondance de bonnes chastagnes,” wrote the great Olivier de Serres more than a thousand years after the fall of the Romans and the rise of Charlemagne, is the result of proper planting of Italian chestnut trees. Serres’ influential manual of country life, “Le Théâtre d’Agriculture” of 1600, would have been found on the old Chateau’s bookshelves. And in the library of our “new” Chateau, constructed in the late 1780s on medieval foundations, one would certainly have come across a copy of that Enlightenment master work, the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert. It also promoted the chestnut:
“La chataigne est la richesse de plusieurs peuples parmi nous; elle les aide à vivre.”
“The chestnut is the wealth of many people among us; it helps them to live.” Entire villages lived on the weaving of baskets from elastic chestnut splints. Or sold the rot-resistant wood as fence posts or lumber for making stable floors and walls. Those who could not afford wheat flour were glad to eat “les bouchasses.”
But the chestnut, notes the author, is difficult to digest. It is best suited to the robust stomachs of persons accustomed to hard labor.
A page from Joseph Pitton de Tournefort's "Eléments de botanique ou méthode pour connaître des plantes" (Elements of botany or a method for identifying plants) of 1694 shows the chestnut from flower to fruit.
Kings might issue orders and the erudite write manuals, but le paysan prefers the authority of long tradition. It was not until the 19th century, with its burgeoning population and widespread interest in agricultural improvement, that chestnuts were widely exploited for nourishment in France. The tree was approvingly called the “arbre à pain,” the tree of bread.
“Chassez le naturel, il revient au galop,” as they say. Chase away nature, it returns at the gallop. A leopard does not change its spots; a Frenchman may only temporarily be separated from his baguette. Chestnut plantations have been in drastic decline since the middle of the 20th century, when rising wealth and industrial food production rendered chestnut bread obsolete.
In France today, the chestnut makes an appearance at Christmas as a bonbon, the “marron glacé” confit in sugar. Or it is roasted on the hearth in a special poêle with holes. And since the 17th century and La Varenne’s “Le Cuisiner français,” almost all cookbooks contain a recipe for the grand classique, “dinde aux marrons,” turkey stuffed with chestnuts.
The aromas of cooked onions, braised chestnuts, fried sausage, and roasting turkey wafted together on their way toward the kitchen ceiling. The windowpanes, cold against the afternoon air, were clouded with steam and a dusting of pearly drops of condensed vapor.
And like the perfume of the Thanksgiving feast, the old traditions of America and France entwined in the mist of memory.
But there was something new this year as well. An exception to that old chestnut – si tu osais le dire! smiled Edward --“l’homme au boulot, la femme au fourneau” (man to his work, woman to her stove).
Viola’s husband Adrien, who wielded a hammer and saw on the gypsy wagon boulot, brought us his home-made cranberry sauce fresh from their fourneau. Mixed with juniper berries, ginger and other spices, les canneberges were delectable.
And thus our feast, in memory of our forebears’ thanks for divine and native providence, mingles gratitude for family traditions with thanks for a new recipe and a new face around the table.
My mother would have been delighted!
Wishing you a very festive saison des fêtes!
Elisabeth
An old postcard shows a family of paysans in the Limousin peeling chestnuts at the turn of the 20th century. A basket woven of chestnut splints sits at their feet.
As always, Heather and Beatrice (info@chateaudecourtomer.com and +33 (0) 6 49 12 87 98) will be happy to help you reserve your own holiday or special gathering at the Chateau or just to rent the Chateau, the Farmhouse or both. We have just a few openings for the end of this year and in 2023, and are taking bookings for 2024 and 2025. We look forward to hearing from you. A bientôt!