Till We Eat Again

Bill Dabney Photography

Jay Reed, a graduate of Ole Miss, lives in Starkville where he is a pharmacist by day and a freelance food writer by day off. He is a member of the Southern Foodways Alliance, co-hosts two podcasts and blogs at www.eatsoneate.com.

BY JAY REED

“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your nose….” It’s a great song, isn’t it? Nat King Cole is a velvety-voiced beast when it comes to Christmas music, which makes it easy to sing right along; though in Mississippi, Jack Frost’s nose-nipping issues are few and far between. And most of us have never eaten a fire-roasted chestnut. I, however, am an exception.

When I tell you I’ve had roasted chestnuts before, I’m not talking about water chestnuts from a can, nestled with liver, wrapped in bacon, and renamed “rumaki.” I’m talking about legit roasted chestnuts. Granted, not all were roasted in the Nat King Cole tradition. In fact, some never got roasted at all. Since The Christmas Song is a memory-invoking masterpiece of mistletoe music, I’m going to take a stroll down a snowy, evergreen-lined memory lane.

Truth: my first roasted chestnut was nowhere near snow, and the closest thing to an evergreen was a palm tree. I was in an enormous mall in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Not the mall with the indoor ski slope, though that would have been even more appropriate for the story. Rather, it was what I remember as the first really big mall in Dubai, with the movie theater and the Chili’s. We were wandering from shop to shop, and around a corner was a little kiosk that reminded me of a vintage popcorn cart. Except they weren’t popping corn, they were roasting chestnuts. In Dubai. In the mall. You can’t make this up. Of course, I had to try them. It was a long time ago, and I’ve already forgotten a lot of details about the flavor except to say that I remember thinking they were pretty good. Definitely no regrets.

Fast forward a decade or so and our family is now back on this side of the pond, spending the Christmas holidays in Williamsburg, Virginia. If you wander the streets of the historic area at night during the holidays, there are lots of fires. Torches light the streets, and bonfires warm the crowds. Jack Frost spends more time nipping noses up that way than he does down here, so bonfires are a good thing if one is wandering around outside. As we were sitting near a fire, probably drinking expensive hot chocolate, my brother-in-law appeared with a handful of roasted chestnuts, presumably roasted over one of those open fires. For all I know, they may have been roasted in a modern commercial kitchen hidden behind a colonial-esque wall, but I doubt it - they’re pretty good about actually doing things the old way. Again, the taste and texture memories are fuzzy, like the outside of a raw chestnut while it grows, but we ate them and they were good. Maybe an acquired taste, not for everybody, but something I would happily eat again.

A year or two ago, someone brought a bag of chestnuts straight off a tree in their yard to the place where I worked at the time. Sometimes people bring brownies or Christmas cookies, but this dude brought a grocery sack full of chestnuts. “Sure, I’ll take some!” I said, with plans to roast them over my fire pit at home, or however Google told me to do it. Then a few months later, I found the sack at the back of my pantry, a little musty, unroasted and sadly, never to be roasted. I’m not proud, but I did learn a valuable lesson: pantries eat chestnuts like dryers eat socks.

We don’t roast chestnuts much in America anymore. It’s not because we’re cooking them another way, or because a couple of years ago Charmin offered “free pound of chestnuts with toilet paper purchase,” or because the song inspired a rush on the chestnut market. It’s actually because of the blight that wiped out most all of the chestnut trees. Before that - well before the song came out, in fact - city street corners around the holidays were as likely as not to have a vendor roasting chestnuts over hot coals. These days you can still find them, but most are imported, though scientists have been working to engineer a chestnut tree that can stand up to the blight and give us our tradition back with a tastier, local nut.

Meanwhile, if your neighbor happens to have a surviving tree and offers you a handful, give roasting a try. It’s a long way to Dubai.