Why No One Roasts Chestnuts In America Anymore – IOTW Report

Why No One Roasts Chestnuts In America Anymore

Monday, 28 December 2020, 22:15 Dr. Tar Uncategorized 42

They don’t because they can’t; all the American chestnut trees are gone. Watch

42 Comments on Why No One Roasts Chestnuts In America Anymore

  2. I never had a roasted chestnut until I went to France with my wife, who is Chinese. She flipped out when she smelled them roasting near the Notre Dame and we found the vendor. It was like being home in China to her. We ate them every day while we were there. Wait til I tell her the reason we can’t eat them here is because of China. At least it wasn’t the goddam Chicoms.

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  4. For a Christmas gift a few years ago, someone gave me a bottle of pickled chestnuts imported from France.

    A tad bland, but I put salt and some spices on them and they were good.

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  5. Our son planted some chestnut trees. My friend wanted buckeyes and so we picked up what we thought were those, later to discover they were really chestnuts with a flattened shape and pointed end. The buckeyes are completely rounded on the bottoms. But apparently you can buy seedlings mail order or something. IDK what kind they are.

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  6. They are pretty good. There used to be a street vender in International District in Seattle that sold roast chestnuts. I have quit going to Seattle, so don’t know if he is still selling them.

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  8. Buckeyes are mostly poisonous, my friend wanted them for a craft project. So buckeyes are probably not something I would want to plant. We found a tree near my old grade school that had been there for decades on a village street by the sidewalk. Us kids used to collect them as a novelty in our pockets.

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  11. Street vendors in NYC still roast and sell chestnuts, at least they did as of Christmas 2019. Despite NYC being run by a commie, it still an interesting place to visit. I wouldn’t go there now on a triple-dare (Christmas Story movie reference… tongue on a steel pole.) Prior to the Bat Stew pandemic, it qualified as a place to visit then leave. I’ll probably be trolled for that remark, but as of today at 11pm EST, the USA is still the land of the (almost) free, right? Your opinion might differ. So be it. I’m old enough to remember people having different opinions. I always thought it promoted a better understanding of the world around us. Trump has an force of 74 million, yet the fraud continues. I don’t get it, but I do enjoy roasted chestnuts.

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  13. No one roasts chestnuts in America anymore for the same reason no one lives ‘free’ like Americans used to.

    First of all….you need the ‘right’ to roast whatever you want.

    Secondly….you need the freedom to roast whatever you want.

    Thirdly….you need the cajones to roast whatever you want.

    Sadly…,the rights have been diminished, the freedoms have been severely curtailed and way too many testicles have been neutered.

    Outside of that—–roasted chestnuts are great.

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  18. @Dee – being a scholar of classical literature and poetry, I instantly recognized the beginning of the poem you mentioned. It was by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Here is the full text.

    https://www.bartleby.com/102/59.html

    Actually, I’m a scholar of classical literature in the same way CNN talking heads are journalists. I just pasted the phrase you typed into Duck Duck Go, so by today’s apparent standards, I’m an expert and scholar.

    My dad just sold some land that had been in our family for generations. His mother had planted 3 chestnut trees across the road from the old home place around the late 1930’s. One died from the blight a couple of decades ago, but 2 of them are still standing and producing chestnuts.

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  19. Mimi and Mac (my Grandparents) had chestnut trees in Charlotte Hall, MD.

    We didn’t know what the hell they were. We called them, “Spiky Ball Trees”, and tossed the things around to stick into people’s hands, shirts, and bald heads.

    We thought it was funny.

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  20. Dad caught one one time. He held his hand open and the thing was spiked into his palm.

    He asked, “Why the hell would you do that?”

    That was the end of The Spiky Ball Tree Game.

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  22. As a teen I planned to make a living from nature, trees, wildlife, as a conservation officer. It never came to fruition despite the degree.

    Back then, college days of the mid-70s, there were a rare few American chestnut trees still alive in southeast Ohio. That didn’t last long. At the same time I was watching the demise of the white elm as Dutch elm blight took them all out. Only spindly specimens exist today. I have one sizable red elm on my property that continues to fail to attract morel mushrooms.

    Since the turn of the century I’ve been watching ALL the ash trees die off in my area. I’ve had to cut six of them off my land. On dead hulk remains, this spring it too will be gone.

    Someday not far off the trees are going to try to remember flip, who also went his way.

    Man will never learn to keep exotics out of the immediate environment, be it insects, plant species, or imported humans.

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  26. “ Man will never learn to keep exotics out of the immediate environment, be it insects, plant species, or imported humans.”

    It’s English ivy and Himalayan blackberries that piss me the hell off most often. Fifteen years of trying to do in the former and a lifetime of hunting in the latter have soured me on both. The ivy was on my property when I bought the house and as big around as a baseball bat. I poison it with whatever I can get my hands on. Roundup only makes it real sick and then a repeat dose when it is week will usually do it, but once established it can be a pain in the ass to totally get rid of it. The blackberries make a quiet stalk or still hunt a nightmare.

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  27. February 1975, the ex-battle axe and I took the train to London for our first anniversary. One cold night in Leister Square, we spotted an old man roasting chestnuts over a fire in a 55 gallon drum. We stood close watching and thinking we’d buy some. He walked a short away and pulled out his junk and started pissing into the gutter. The square was very crowded but nobody seemed to care. He then walked back to his drum and continued to peddle his wares. We passed on the chestnuts.

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  28. February 1975, the ex-battle axe and I took the train to London for our first anniversary. One cold night in Leister Square, we spotted an old man roasting chestnuts over a fire in a 55 gallon drum. We stood close watching and thinking we’d buy some. He walked a short distance away and pulled out his junk and started pissing into the gutter. The square was very crowded but nobody seemed to care. He then walked back to his drum and continued to peddle his wares. We passed on the chestnuts.

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  29. The next blight that worries me is oak wilt. It appears to be moving as relentlessly as previous blights. They need to come up with an inexpensive way to inoculate the hundreds of millions of trees that could die in the next twenty or thirty years.

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  31. My old house had a large american chestnut and an osage orange bow wood tree. Dad would gather the chestnuts and the osage branches to make stuff on the lathe.The new owners cut all the trees down,kind of sad to see it happen.

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  32. dee
    DECEMBER 28, 2020 AT 11:11 PM
    “Under the spreading chestnut tree the village smithy stands. .”

    …it’s a Longfellow poem, you can see the whole thing here…

    https://www.hwlongfellow.org/poems_poem.php?pid=38

    …ironically, it was used in modified form in Orwell’s “1984” to highlight the way the peasants could be made to turn on each other so the Government never has to worry about rebellion, which is kind of topical for today…

    “Under the spreading chestnut tree/I sold you and you sold me…”

    https://literarydevices.net/under-the-spreading-chestnut-tree/

    …once again, I don’t think Orwell MEANT to write an instruction manual for tyranny, but here we are…

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  34. Dee and SNS, do you remember Bullwinkle reciting that poem on Bullwinkle’s Corner (where Bullwinkle would read classic poetry and sometimes deliberately butcher it but it was always funny) on the Rocky and Bullwinkle show, I do. I believe if I remember right that the Village Smithy was none other than Boris Badenov. Geez Louise, I’m a geezer for remembering that.

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  37. geoff the aardvark
    DECEMBER 29, 2020 AT 8:26 AM

    …yep, old cartoons were actually pretty good at sneaking some culture and learning in on us kids, and we didn’t even realize we were picking up on it…I bet most folks leaned a lot of classical music just listening to old Warner Brothers cartoons, too…of course they would keep it entertaining like when Bullwinkle would tell Rocky to “Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat”, but it was still MUCH better than the toy commercials/SJW messaging systems they foist on the kids NOW…

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  41. I roasted some Italian chestnuts this year. They’re dry as Hell. I had to chop them up and use them in pancakes and banana bread. They were not palatable on their own but good taste additives to other items.

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