I don’t know if I can ever eat chestnuts again.
Let’s start at the beginning. Having just left the Mennonite farmers’ market in State College, Pa with a quart of chestnuts, I screeched to a halt along the side of the road and ask Lewis and Kendra to jump out and gather up what looks like the chestnut pods scattered under a tree. It took them quite some time and involved Lewis removing his jacket and cradling the nuts. When they returned to the car I learned that the covering, as you can see above, is dense with extremely sharp spikes. Well, I was excited, despite my family’s discomfort, because I knew they’d be fabulous to photograph. We bagged them up and brought then home to the farm after our visit with K&E.
The next morning the bag of purchased chestnuts had worms crawling out all over the counter!!! I now know much more than I wanted to know about chestnut weevils, both Curculio sayi Gyllenhal and Curculio caryatrypes Bohemian. Chestnuts need to be heat treated to kill the eggs and pre-emergent larvae, yet, the thought of ingesting either the eggs or the maturing grubs that remain in death inside the nuts is revolting to me. Now I know how vegans feel about eating chicken eggs.
It’s obvious by the teeny tiny hole in the shell of half of the chestnuts which I bought contained one or two grubs. Wait. Now that the grubs have burrowed out, maybe I can rally the courage to cook them up (the chestnuts, I mean!). I’ve wanted to add them to a farro stuffing for a beauty of a buttercup winter squash waiting patiently on the counter.
Time will tell.
Sheila
