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Noble Chestnut - Castanea Sativa
Noble Chestnut - Castanea Sativa

Video: Noble Chestnut - Castanea Sativa

Video: Noble Chestnut - Castanea Sativa
Video: European Chestnut (Castanea sativa) Grove in Gran Canaria mountains 2024, March
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Chestnut is the third bread

I would like to tell the readers of the magazine about one wonderful plant. Edible or noble chestnut is a glorious tree with a rich and mysterious history, a tree that was lucky, along with grapes, wheat, olive, to become one of the very first significant acquisitions of universal human culture.

It should be clarified that the usual horse chestnut and edible chestnut are absolutely two different plants, not similar to each other either in appearance, or in flowers, or in fruits. And if the fruits of the edible chestnut are widely used in cooking, then the horse chestnut is good only for decorative and medicinal purposes.

Noble chestnut. Photo: Wikipedia
Noble chestnut. Photo: Wikipedia

Noble chestnut is a deciduous tree or shrub with brown bark. The plant is pollinated by the wind, its flowers are inconspicuous. The inflorescence is in the form of an ear. In the second half of summer, among the long dark green leaves of the noble chestnut, spherical, apple-sized, light green seedlings appear, densely covered with thorns and resembling a hedgehog. In October, first the fruits, and then their bristly wrappers, fall to the ground.

Since ancient times, during the ripening season of chestnuts, all the population able to move gathered in chestnut groves. Men and boys climbed trees and dropped the fruits down, while the women collected them and placed them in various containers. In mountainous areas not adapted for arable farming, the fruits of the edible chestnut provided people with food for a whole year.

Nowadays, chestnuts remain an important food product for a significant part of the population of Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Greece. On the French island of Corsica, famous for its chestnut thickets, until recently one could meet old people who had never tasted grain bread: it was an excellent substitute for chestnut bread. The chestnut field does not require any worries - come every fall and pour the harvest into the bins. The Marseilles joke: the banana makes the inhabitant of the tropics lazy, and the chestnut makes the Corsican …

Yes, chestnuts are bread, and not only nutritious, but also delicious. Yellowish, with a sweet aftertaste, chestnut flour is surprisingly similar in composition to wheat flour, but much surpasses it in sugar content, fat content and, most importantly, protein. It is not surprising that the addition of chestnut flour to wheat flour, even for our modern taste, does not worsen, but improves the quality of the bread. The dough from chestnut flour rises better than from cereal flour, a beautiful appetizing crust appears during baking (a consequence of the abundance of sugars), the products are lush, airy.

In Russia, the sowing chestnut, or noble, can be found in the forests on the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus. It reaches 40 meters in height and 2 meters in diameter. Its crown is spreading, and the root system is strong. Chestnuts live for 500 years or more. Fruits begin to appear in 5-10 years.

Already many thousands of years ago, man invented a variety of methods for preparing chestnuts. The dish of steaming fragrant chestnuts, boiled with salt, is perhaps no younger than the Old Russian oatmeal. And the method of withering chestnuts, which exists today in the Krasnodar Territory, Georgia, and Armenia, has certainly come unchanged since the times when the fabulous country of the Golden Fleece sent them to Hellas.

From time immemorial, a bonfire and coals have been at hand with the traveler. And the most unpretentious dish - baked or fried chestnuts - was destined to survive almost all epochs in the history of civilization and remain loved even today. And today on the streets of many cities in Europe, Asia, America they sell hot chestnuts fried on portable braziers.

Chestnuts are also stuffed with ducks and chickens, used instead of potatoes when stewing game, rabbit, poultry, boiled confitures, creams, mashed potatoes, soups, make desserts, ground into flour, which is used in baking bread, muffins, pancakes, glazed in sugar syrup … It is not surprising that chestnuts and dishes with the addition of these fruits are a must on the festive table of Europeans. You can endlessly talk and write about chestnuts and their dishes, they are so universal and tasty in all their guises.

IV Michurin was deeply right: this valuable tree deserves special attention. A hectare of chestnut plantings can yield up to three tons of valuable flour. It is unpretentious - from the European experience it is known that rocky mountain inconveniences, unsuitable for other fruit trees, became profitable areas after cultivating edible chestnut on them. Late blooming edible chestnut stands against the well-known scourge of fruit growing - spring frosts. It is no coincidence that the world production of chestnut fruits has now reached 1.5 million tons. In our agricultural nursery, the edible chestnut has been successfully adapted to the conditions of the Central strip. We hope that gardeners who are passionate about what they love will be able to acclimatize this beneficial plant in more northern regions. Anyone looking for interesting vegetable, fruit, flower and medicinal plants can contact the online store:www.super-ogorod.7910.org or write to the address: 607060, Vyksa, Nizhny Novgorod region, dep. 2, P. O. Box 52 - to Andrey Viktorovich Kozlov.

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