Pleasures of the Season: Collecting Chestnuts

“Pleasures of the Season” is a series of posts which appear from time to time.  They focus on something special that occurs only seasonally, often fleeting, and something we anticipate.  They highlight moments of what I’ve learned about living with the seasons since moving to Southern France.

            The chestnuts are starting to fall.  There is no turning back now; fall is here and winter is on its heels.  We gather and prepare a lot in this season; the garden is still producing (September is its bumper month) and nature unwraps many treasures.  I think chestnuts are my favorite.  The chestnut trees here were planted eons ago.  Their wood was, and still is, used for housing beams because it is immune to almost any insect.  The nuts, ground into flour, became the nutritional base for people who once lived here.  Wheat was rare, so all breads were made with chestnut flour.  Today, we use the nuts in cooking, pastries, and most often, in jams.

            When I first arrived here, I really thought collecting chestnuts was like picking apples.  I imagined climbing trees like I did years ago and tossing the fruit down into the bushel basket below.  Picking chestnuts is nothing at all like that.

            First, chestnuts fall from the tree; there is no climbing high into the branches between colored leaves to get them.  They are enveloped in a thorny bog which needs to be removed to reveal the nut inside.  The needles on the bog are small and fine and one prick leaves a handful of embedded needles in the skin that are impossible to remove.  Clearly, this presents a problem, but one Christophe learned to overcome as a child: he would step on them.  This is not unique to him.  In fact, outside being a professional chestnut producer, this is the proper way to harvest them.  Christophe showed me how to sandwich the bog between my shoes and gently squeeze the nut out.  All contact with the bog is avoided and the nut is collected, pain free.

            It’s clearly not as poetic as hanging from a branch in an apple orchard, but it is fun all the same.  I like knowing we do something people have done centuries before us.  It is part of the culture, and a rhythm of life coming full circle.  The repetition of an act, like the seasons, is something taken at its moment because things change and quickly disappear, and then, it's too late.