Classic Gardening

What a scandal: sacks of chestnuts put out with the rubbish in a suburban street.
The kids were horrified when I picked one out of a bin-liner, pushed back its spiky green jacket with gloved hands, then bit and peeled its glossy brown skin to get at the white, crunchy flesh. It was like a nutty Wensleydale: deliciously cold, bitter and milky.
I couldn’t rescue them all, but I did stuff my pockets. I mean, does nobody around here know that this is a waste of very good food?
You see all sorts of good food going to waste in the city, yet you also find plenty of people who would dearly love to have some of their unwanted crop. Having blogged about my quince thief recently, I got a knock on the door during the week from someone who was passing and wondered if he could have a few of those that were left (I’d missed a few high ones) because his wife wanted to make quince jam. He was welcome to them.
Telling friends who live in the country about this they said that, in their village, people with surplus fruit and other crops put them in a box by the gate with a “Help yourself” sign on them.
So, my caller’s wife got her quince for jam, I got my chestnuts for – what?
I once read A place in Italy by Eric Newby, in which he buys a farm surrounded by chestnut woods. The farm still has a chestnut-roasting outhouse. Dried, chestnuts make a flour - for pasta and gnocchi - that in poorer times was the staple diet in the area.
I had more modest goals for my rescued harvest: a chestnut terrine and a chestnut pasta sauce with ham and cheese, from recipes in a book that had been sitting on the shelf just waiting for the raw ingredients to become available.*
First, cook your chestnuts. I chose to boil rather than roast them, which involved cutting them in half and popping in bubbling water for 15 minutes. Then you have to take them out of their skins. Use a spoon, says the book. That doesn’t work. Some crumble, others leave half their flesh behind. So I start peeling with my thumbnail.
Pop them in ice water, says the book, then the bitter, brown inner-skin will come off. Yeah, easier said than done.
And quite a lot are bad. It takes me about an hour to go from 2kg of nuts in shells to 600g of cooked flesh ready for liquidising. I add some of the cooking water, which is chestnut-brown like something you’d use to paint the shed. Slowly the dry mess turns into a slick puree. I add it to onions and finely sliced mushrooms fried earlier; then spoon the mixture into a loaf tin. After chilling in the fridge I turn it over - and out pops a perfect brick of terrine. It’s delicious: moist, creamy, earthy and nutty.
I save some of the chestnuts until later in the week, for the pasta sauce. It is divine. To a base of fried diced onions you add the quartered chestnuts plus chopped ham, yoghurt, parsley and grated cheese.
Every so often I day-dream about the house-with-land that we’ll move to one day. It has a growing list of essentials: a mulberry tree, a quince; room for a modest orchard of apple, pear, plum and cherry. But now I find there is another absolute must-have: a chestnut wood.
And there will be several boxes by the gate - some for my unwanted crops, the rest for donations from others. I'll call it Crop Swap Corner



*On Chestnuts by Ria Loobhuizen (Prospect Books)

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