Chestnuts

I’m bringing brussels sprouts to thanksgiving.  For some reason I know as a rule of thumb that “chestnuts pair with brussels sprouts” so I decided to peel a few handfuls to add to the vegetables.

Cookbooks and online guides say to pierce, slash, or score the nuts before roasting.  I never do this because I like listening to them explode in the oven.  But today I’m hoping to keep the meats intact, so I’m going to do this the right way.

After a few of those, it was clearly only a matter of time until I wound up slicing open my hand, so I switched to a sawing approach.

Tedious!  But, 10 or so minutes of this, and the pan was ready for roasting.

15 minutes of baking, followed by a good 90 minutes of peeling produced this, about a pint of finished product:

Whenever I eat (or try to eat) chestnuts I think about the dark-age southern Europeans who ate nothing else.  I can’t decide if this is an idyllic image or a horrifying one.  On the one hand, you have people living off the land, eating the fruit of trees planted by the Romans 1000 years earlier — no tilling, no weeding, just chasing the occasional pig out of the grove.  It’s a pretty beautiful image.  But their thumbnails must have been so sore!