{"id":1161,"date":"2010-10-09T15:03:24","date_gmt":"2010-10-09T22:03:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mimitabby.com\/blog\/?p=1161"},"modified":"2010-10-09T15:03:24","modified_gmt":"2010-10-09T22:03:24","slug":"le-castagne-chestnuts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mimitabby.com\/blog\/le-castagne-chestnuts","title":{"rendered":"Le Castagne – Chestnuts"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Calabria, once upon a time before there were tomatoes (there was a time like this!) and before there was inexpensive pasta, people subsisted on Chestnuts – there was little else so readily available to stave off starvation in the wintertime. They boiled them with other vegetables, they dried them and ground them up for flour to make a heavy kind of bread, and they slowly roasted them in stone ovens for a delicious aromatic snack. The wood as well was very important, used for many purposes, from furniture to firewood.\"\"
\n An elaborate system of gathering, cleaning and drying these nuts developed, with some parts of the process assigned to men, and others to women and children. If you’ve ever been to Calabria in the late summer or early autumn, you have seen these large trees pregnant with big prickly yellowish green spherical husks, nasty to touch, with one to four chestnuts inside. They usually fall in mid October, almost exactly the same time every year. The last two times I visited, I was just a little too early to be able to participate in the harvest. This time, on the day before I left Calabria, my cousin presented me with a pound or so of the very first chestnuts of the season. \"\"
\nEven though people no longer subsist on Chestnuts, they are still a relatively important crop. They are now used more for treats than subsistence, and are also given to pigs to fatten them up. I have one cousin whose job it is to study the health of the Castagno (Chestnut tree) and another of my cousins, Teresa Riccio, has actually written a book about the historical and sociological significance of this tree Il castagno nella tradizione di una Comunit\u00c3\u00a0 Presilana: Sersale<\/a>. And I just discovered that they are very fun to paint!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Calabria, once upon a time before there were tomatoes (there was a time like this!) and before there was inexpensive pasta, people subsisted on Chestnuts – there was little else so readily available to stave off starvation in the wintertime. They boiled them with other vegetables, they dried them and ground them up for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,21,12,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-acquarello","category-food-art","category-historic","category-italia"],"yoast_head":"\nLe Castagne - Chestnuts - Mimi Torchia Boothby<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.mimitabby.com\/blog\/le-castagne-chestnuts\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Le Castagne - Chestnuts - Mimi Torchia Boothby\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In Calabria, once upon a time before there were tomatoes (there was a time like this!) and before there was inexpensive pasta, people subsisted on Chestnuts – there was little else so readily available to stave off starvation in the wintertime. 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