Happiness is a hot chestnut.

"Marrons!  Chauds, chauds les mar-r-rons!  These words send a frisson of delight up my spine.  What they mean is that I could--if I wanted to--indulge in a newspaper cone of hot roasted chestnuts.  Wait, scratch the "if I wanted to."  The truth is, I always want hot chestnuts.  More to the point, will I give in to temptation?

In late autumn, temptation--in the form of slightly charred, burning hot chestnuts--confronts me at many key locations in Paris.  A map of the locations known to me personally is stored in an up-front, easily accessible part of my brain.  Whenever I encounter a new stand, I automatically update my database.  This happens effortlessly, almost unconsciously.  The virtual pins stuck in my brain's map of Paris represent the grilled chestnut stands that pop up throughout the city around the first of November, as spontaneous as a crop of wild mushrooms after a fall rain. 

Their appearance is in perfect sync with the sudden availability of fresh chesnuts on the market.  These stands melt back into oblivion some time in January, only to appear again at the accustomed spot the following year.  Hot chestnuts are indeed as ephemeral a pleasure as wild mushrooms, but, if you live in Paris, they're much easier to find.

A hot chestnut stand is really commerce at its simplest.  It consists of the butt end of a metal drum mounted in a shopping cart.  Inside the drum smolders a charcoal fire.  A jury-rigged, slightly concave metal plate with holes poked in it covers the fire.  I'm not sure of the origin of this piece of metal, but I'm willing to bet it's something easily salvaged--like maybe a hubcap.  The owners of the stands seem to mostly be of North African origin--at least here in Paris.  I'm not sure when the chesnut-roasting concession fell to them, as chestnut vending certainly predated our North African immigrants.  But they are now the undisputed masters of the art of chesnut grilling.

One thing that's always amazed me about the hot chesnuts I buy from the street vendors is that they're never difficult to peel.  Unlike the chesnuts Denis and I grill over the fire in Normandy, the street versions always part effortlessly with that tenacious inner brown skin that stubbornly intervenes between the shell and the nut within. Over a lifetime of chesnut peeling and eating, I've come up with various theories about what can make that skin stick so stubbornly to the meat of the chesnut inside.  For one thing, I've observed that the inner skin almost always sticks to moldy or wormy nuts.  This is convenient, as the skin has an acrid taste and so discourages you from eating what would otherwise be a horrible nut anyway.

Yet, sometimes the skin mysteriously refuses to part from a perfectly good nut.  And no matter how much I would wish otherwise, the persistent skin firmly spoils the pleasure of eating a roasted chestnut.  Not only is the skin astringent, but it refuses to soften in your mouth.  Hard shards of it tend to embed in the crevices around your tonsils, causing you to gag unbecomingly like a cat coughing up a hairball.  And if you're peeling a large quantity of chesnuts--say, for your holiday turkey stuffing--trying to remove this stubborn inner skin will make your fingernails part ever so slightly from the nailbeds, a painful condition guaranteed to cast a pall over the rest of your cooking day. 

All of this is to impress upon you that, for the serious fan of roasted chesnuts, this thing about the skin sticking is crucial!  So here's my current theory, which I've come up with after observing the chesnut vendors.  Needless to say, theirs is a marginal way of making a living.  They have two fixed expenses:  the charcoal and the chestnuts.  And to maximize their profit margin, they're very penurious with their charcoal.  The number of chesnuts you get for your two euros, on the other hand, seems to be fixed by a mysterious city-wide consensus which would make a good thesis topic for an anthropology student.  So, the vendors grill over the tiniest fires imaginable, turning the chestnuts over and over with their fire-toughened, blackened fingers to get maximal cooking value out of that miniscule amount of heat.  They continually rotate the fully cooked nuits to the periphery of the grill while nudging the undercooked ones toward the hotter center.

I'm convinced that it's the incredible slowness of this roasting process, and its ever so low heat level, that account for the perfect peelability of the Paris street chestnut.  I continue to be intrigued by the implications of this revelation.  What could be simpler than roasting a chestnut, you would think.  Yet, I spent the better part of a lifetime roasting and eating chestnuts without figuring this out until now.  In its very simplicity is embedded a patient art--a savoir-faire that makes the roasted chestnut a true Slow Food.

There's a ritual and even a know-how to buying a cone of roasted chestnuts in Paris--one that I learned by trial and error.  During my first autumn in Paris (I conveniently arrived just at the start of chestnut season), I would watch in rapt fascination as the vendor deftly fashioned his cornet of newspaper in the twinkling of an eye.  He then packed it with nuts, balancing the last one precariously on top probably as a gesture of generosity.  More likely the extra nut hanging in the balance was insurance against some hothead protesting that he or she hadn't received the full measure.  Next, the vendor would hand me the cornet.  (In the etiquette and tradition of the French chestnut stand, you always receive the goods before tendering payment.  Trying to reverse the sequence for the sake of convenience only causes confusion.)  Now would come my moment of neophyte clumsiness.  Already laden with shopping bags, I'd try to balance that extra nut while groping for my wallet, opening it one-handed, and extracting a ten-franc coin (this was just before the euro).  Invariably, and to my deep regret, the extra nut would go skittering off into the gutter.

Now, I know to have my two-euro coin ready in hand when I approach the vendor.  And I come away from each transaction one nut richer!  I've also figured out that the best way to handle peeling and eating the nuts while walking down the street is to stash the cornet in my coat pocket.  This keeps the nuts nice and warm while I get around to eating them.  It also makes for a pleasant--if one-sided--hand warmer.  The downside is the embarrassing moment when I pull my gloves out of my pockets and a shower of charred peel shards falls on the floor.  Also, trying to hide my uncouth "dirty" fingers--blackened from peeling the shells--from the impeccably proper Frenchwoman I invariably find my self interacting with after my guilty pleasure.

 Sometimes I feel as if the hot chestnut is the very symbol of why I moved here from my former home in the Middle West.  When I was only three, my Swiss mother took me back to Switzerland for about a year.  There, I was initiated into the pleasures of the chestnut--its irresistible trace of sweetness, its satisfying starchiness, its flavor which really resembles nothing else.  Not only did I experience the plebeian pleasure of the street chestnut, but I encountered the chestnut in more sophisticated and ever more seductive guises.  Around Christmas, there were the almost unbearably delicious marrons glacés--vanilla-infused candied chestnuts individually wrapped in gold foil like the royal sweetmeats they are.  And very occasionally, there would be a Mont Blanc for dessert in a good restaurant.  This confection of a meringue topped with a mountain of chestnut puree and half-buried under an avalanche of whipped cream was my personal seventh heaven.  After we moved back to Indiana, these treats became accessible only in my childish memory, where their sweetness and inimitable chestnut-ness lingered like a wonderful dream.  In fact, with each instance of recall, the taste of the chestnut achieved ever more mythic proportions on the virtual tongue of my memory.  The chesnut--in the chestnut-less wasteland of post-chesnut-blight America--became for me the very flavor of a nostalgia for Europe.  Acting on that nostalgia took a lifetime.

 Here in France, the chestnut is a symbol of autumn.  Along with wild mushrooms and game, Reine de Reinette and Calville Blanc apples, the chestnut ushers in the bouquet of fall flavors, both deeper and darker than their summer counterparts--flavors we savor all the more for knowing that they are fleeting.  Here, I've met chestnuts in the flesh as it were, feeling the vicious prick of their spiny husks, bristling with spikes like lime-green sea urchins.  I've smelled the curious and powerful aroma of a chestnut tree in full flower, and tasted this fragrance incarnate in strong, dark chestnut honey.

 I have in my memory a majestic wild chestnut tree outside the ghost town of Contadour in the mountains of Haute Provence.  This tree nourished the inhabitants of what was once a lively hamlet.  Now, its generous fruits fall forgotten to the ground.  In my midn#s eye, its thick almost horizontal branches are forever laden with the enormous, lime-green orbs of its fruit, and I see ghostly figures gathering the nuts.

 I own a wooden chestnut rake, made to rake up the spiny fallen fruits and flip them into a basket.  I've travelled through Corsica, whre the chestnut is still a mainstay in many people's diets.  There, chestnuts are foraged by the magnificent native black pigs, which in turn are transformed into the best charcuterie I've ever tasted.  And in the Norman town of Honfleur, I've seen a church sided with chestnut-wood shakes that re 300 years old and still in perfect condition.  The wood the chestnut, it seems, lasts forever.

I've roamed through the province of Ardèche, where wild chesnuts, along with wild blueberries, still provide a subsistence living for a good part of the population.  There I met Rosalynne Bazin, who makes her living with chestnuts and angora rabbits.  It was from Mme. Bazin that I learned the best way to conserve fresh chestnuts:  Cover them with cold water and keep them in a cool place, changing the water every couple of days.  Chestnuts stored this way will stay in perfect conditionfor several weeks.  (Stored in bags in the refrigerator, they quickly dry out and become inedible.)

I've eaten the wondrous goat cheese of Banon, soaked in local eau de vie and wrapped in chestnut leaves, tied up with raffia like nature's prettiest package.  And I've seen centuries-old stone buildings with slatted lofts, where wood fires burn below to dry the chestnuts on the slats above, preserving them for year-round use.  The truth is, I feel happier in a world where these life patterns persist.  And surrounded once a year with such abundance, I've been able to cook with chestnuts to my heart's content.

Thanks to the growing availability of good-quality, vacuum-packed chestnuts, you no longer need to pull out your fingernails peeling two pounds of roasted chestnuts.  Nevertheless, don't let that gimmick prevent you from experiencing first-hand the primordial pleasure of fire-toasted chestnuts on a chilly winter evening.  But remember, wait until you have a bid of embers and roast them...slowly!

 

P.S.  For the recipe for triple chestnut bread (photo right), go to 'Dans la cuisine.')

 

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