Let’s Make Downbread

Bet you haven’t. But I can see the hordes rushing to the speciality stores to get themselves a loaf or two… Or, perhaps not.

I am not personally all that familiar with the term “downbread”, but then, unlike Dr Who, I was never near the 16th  century, or even before.

In 1590 a guy called Thomas Harriot said of the locals (‘Red Indians’ a.k.a Native Americans) in North Carolina, (the spelling is correct): “Chestnvts there are in diuers places great store: some they vse to eate rawe, some they stamp and boil to make spoonmeate, and with some being sodden they make such a manner of downbread as they vse their beanes.”

Apparently, because there is no gluten, bread made entirely of chestnut flour does not rise like wheat flour, and was referred to as “downbread” in earlier centuries.

Although I have no intention of making downbread, but having a small stash of chestnuts (actually, to be more accurate a very tiny stash – oK, in fact a couple of nuts) but I thought some readers may be interested, just in case…

(Above): We ended up with a very small crop of fertile nuts for the 2013/2014 season as there is only one tree which apparently results in infertile nuts. We got tons of threesomes instead of the correct pairs in the pods.

Chestnut flour costs approx $25US. To import it will naturally depend on freight and duties, so you can see that it certainly ain’t cheap. To make chestnut flour, I suspect that you probably need a bushel or two, so you’ll need a few trees.

Either cut a slit in the chestnuts or cut them in half. Place them on a pan and put into the oven to roast until the shells will peel away easily (about 40-45 minutes). Remove the shells and the papery covering (pellicle) and let them cool. Freeze the nuts for about 45 minutes. Grind the frozen chestnuts until you reach a meal-like consistency. Store the flour in an airtight container, preferably in the freezer. To make the flour in a historic setting, or in the absence of a power source, a mortar and pestle should work well.

I only came across these instructions after I’d completed my boiling, so there. Here is what I did:

Step 1: Select sufficient healthy raw chestnuts for processing. Say about 4 kilos. I didn’t have the luxury of following any selection process. Just a handful or two. Something tells me we will not be able to make downbread – not even half a downbun, really.

As an aside, do you suppose the early population in America were into buns? Like over the weekends, maybe? Did they like downtoast? I can’t find any references…

(Above) Step 2: Using a breadknife, cut a cross into the hard leather-like skin, to make peeling easier later on. At that stage, you could say that you’ve got Hot Cross Nuts!

(Above) Step 3: Place you Cross nuts in a saucepan, cover with water and add 5 teaspoons of table salt. If you have a bushel of nuts, naturally you’ll need a tad more salt – not sure how much you’ll need… Boil for about 15 to 20 minutes (or longer for the bushel folk? – I’d play it by ear.)

(Above) Step 4: When the nuts are done, drain the water and allow the nuts to cool sufficiently to handle without causing pain (to your fingers, silly, not the nuts).

At this stage, I’d fallen prey to the temptation to have a chew – what a pleasant surprise when I discovered that the earlier experience in my youth was probably because of poor preparation or peeling and cleaning of the cooked nuts.

I found them distinctly tasty with a slight “floury” texture – which we now know is a property and not a defect. I am not sure whether the brown membrane layer is the pellicle, or whether that was the slightly thicker layer which I’ve already removed. They are currently cooling down, so I have some minutes before I need to make any life-changing decision…

Apparently the flour can be used as a partial replacement for the white flour in Chestnut Bread, it can be blended with milk and spices to make a Chestnut Soup. Using half Chestnut flour and half wheat flour, one can make Chestnut Muffins.

There is also Chestnut Pudding and Chestnut Cake, but, let’s face it, if you had an unlimited supply of chestnuts and no supermarket to supply you with any sort of flour, you too, would probably try all these things!

Nut Cases

Anyone who has planted a couple of bean seeds, and then watched in agony for them to grow into plants and then to produce succulent juicy green pods, to pick them dew-fresh and chew their crunchy produce right there in your very own garden, will know what I am talking about.

There’s a bit of inner excitement, of satisfaction, that your sweat and tears and the talking to the tardy non-cooperative plants, when the harvest time dawns. Naturally, everyone is a bit hasty at trying to pick the crop – patience comes with experience, but each fruiting season brings its own circumstances.

I, too, am in this stage of virgin gardener. Some of the seeds which I have planted are “looking good”, some are not so good, but, above all else, I am convinced that I have the healthiest most prolific weeds in the whole of the valley – I have treated them rough and tough – used the language of sailors, denied them even the smallest dose of water, even stooped so low as to place nasty voodoo curses on them.

But weeds are survivors.

Currently, the majority of the Chartwell harvest is derived from the fruit trees which were inherited from previous owners of the property as part of the purchase of No 53. (You may have heard the lyrics to a well-known song “Number fifty-three, the house with the Chestnut tree…”) I have blogged a couple of the harvests – peach, quince, plum. There have been a couple of varieties of apples and of pears, which have not performed as anticipated.

However, the two trees which are perhaps not so common-or-garden, which are present are (a) the chestnut in the New Fence fruit row and (b) the walnut in the Secret Garden. I have previously reported on both of these in earlier blogs. But possibly of further interest may be:

(a) Numero Uno nut case:

 
The fruit being produced by the pods on the Chestnut Tree are (pictured above) infertile, shrunken, dried out and occurring in groups of three. They consist of the typical leathery outer shell and no flesh at all inside; while below, we have encountered a strange phenomenon – from the very same (apparently infertile) tree, a few pods have been producing proper flesh-bearing fruit (pictured below). I have tried to find out more about this situation, without much success. Perhaps we can monitor the tree and pollination more carefully next season? 

(b) Numero Duo nut case:

This covers the fruit of the Walnut. Here, we have had no real harvesting problems. However, the biodiversity in the Secret Garden is giving grief: in the shape and form of a marauding Possum who frequents the tree every night without fail. This Australian brushtail possum (Trichosurus vulpecula), which, according to the literature, does not have very strong jaws. However, I have my suspicions, because every morning there is a whole bunch of freshly cracked open walnut shells, smashed opened in a way that no human would use. The possum evidently does not have a sharp knife with a point.

(Above): As the nut-gathering season progresses and now starts nearing its end, the possum is beginning to get the lion’s share each evening. A few weeks ago, each morning, I could collect five to ten good condition nuts for ourselves and there would be, say the remains of four which had been eaten under cover of darkness. Today there were only three for us, and the possum’s “empties” numbered four!  

One for them, three for me…  One for them,….

Chestnuts Roasting…

Chestnuts roasting on an open fire,
Jack Frost nipping at your nose,
Yuletide carols being sung by a choir,
And folks dressed up like Eskimos.

My earliest recollection of chestnuts was also my first encounter with them. A summer evening when I was a lad of 12, in December 1959 at an outdoor induction evening at Westerford High School in Cape Town. I was due to start Standard 6 (Grade 8 or 9 nowadays) in January 1960.

Around the grassed sportsfields grew these huge towering umbrella-like trees, shedding ping-pong sized little hedgehogs. The first thing you learn about this nut is that the bristles break off and fester under the skin.

(Above) From the Westerford website, I see that the Chestnut trees have grown somewhat since then. I also see that they held the 50th Reunion get-together for my graduation class of 1964 four days ago. No wonder the trees have aged a bit.

Back in those days, we boiled (with a spoon of salt, I think) the raw nuts, and then we ate the (floury pasty) almost-bitter things. Not a favourite. There was something furry about them, I seem to remember…

40 years later, around the year 2000, we holidayed in Funchal, Madeira where we encountered vendors with barrows of chestnuts packed in hessian bags. We didn’t buy any… Hey! I’m not exactly Mr Adventurous.

(Above): Another 14 years on, and I meet with Chartwell’s lone Chestnut, which is unlike Westerford’s yesteryear specimens, a seemingly spritely young lass.

(Above): The fruit/nuts seem to be fairly prolific in the early stages of development. I guess they have another month or so to go… (based on my deep technical expertise)

(Above): Some have already started falling to the grass below – not sure whether this is good or bas, because they look rather small, if memory serves…

Having said all this, there is a wee potential little problem. This Mommy tree hasn’t had a nice friendly Daddy tree visiting her, so perhaps her little babies may not be quite so normal… I opened one of the little hedgehogs (yes, with some spikes in the fingers) and found triplets all shrivelled and skinny… not quite what I would have liked to find – only fibre, fur and leather, instead of yummy potato-type stuff…

(Above): Shrivelled triplets with fur inside.

The technical guys say that you will not get proper fruit from a lone tree and that you must have at least two for cross-pollination.

If something should come of these (I am the eternal optimist), perhaps we should roast some and boil some. Roasting at about 200ºC for 15 to 40 minutes, or boiling until soft-ish. Or perhaps I should rather take advice…

As the fruit of these trees are classified as “nuts”, it is probably advisable for those with nut intolerance to steer clear of them. However, Water chestnuts very unlike chestnuts are a tuber vegetable that only resembles a chestnut in colour and shape and thus are probably Ok for nut-intolerants.

Various chestnut varieties include:
Castanea alnifolia – bush chinkapin
Castanea crenata – Japanese chestnut
Castanea dentata – American chestnut
Castanea henryi – Henry's chestnut
Castanea mollissima – Chinese chestnut
Castanea ozarkensis – Ozark chinkapin
Castanea pumila – Allegheny chinkapin
Castanea sativa – Sweet chestnut (European)
Castanea seguinii – Seguin's chestnut

I will keep an eye on the 2014 chestnut crop, especially because we have a resident hungry and elusive possum at Chartwell. I think some security measures shouldn’t go amiss.

The walnut tree will be bearing fruit much later, and the danger of possum-attack on that variety of nut is unquestionable, so the measures taken with the chestnut might well serve as a dry-run rehearsal for later in the year…

Not knowing much (anything at all) about Chestnut trees as such, I consulted our technical department for scientific data:

• The European chestnut (Castanea sativa), a large-growing (up to 20m ) and wide-spreading tree which originated around Turkey and the Black Sea region of southern Russia. The nuts are quite variable, but superior fruiting varieties possess good size, sweet taste and have pellicles (inner skins) which are easy to remove. This tree is the most commonly seen chestnut species in New Zealand where it was introduced by the early settlers. This species is also known in English-speaking countries as the sweet chestnut or the Spanish chestnut.
• The Japanese chestnut (Castanea crenata), a small to medium sized tree, about 10m high, which is typically multi-leadered and wide-spreading when open-grown. Some varieties have very large nuts (about 40g – nearly the size of small potatoes). Nuts of this species typically have pellicles which are difficult to remove. This species is well—adapted to wet and humid weather conditions and hot summers (about 30°C), and as such would suit much of the upper North Island. These trees have been present in New Zealand since the early 1900s.
• The Chinese chestnut (Castanea mollissima), a medium sized tree, growing to about 15m, often multi-leadered and wide-spreading. Nuts usually have pellicles which are easy to remove and come in a wide range of sizes, although they are typically smaller than the Japanese chestnut. At present the Chinese chestnut is a rare tree in New Zealand, but recent imports will soon change this.
• The American chestnut (Castanea dentata). Of all the chestnut species this is the largest, growing to 30m, with the straightest trunk, and was prized as a timber tree in its native land before its demise as a result of the devastating fungus disease called chestnut blight. Nuts are typically very small (only about 5g), but quite sweet tasting, with pellicles which are easy to remove. This tree is rare in New Zealand, but has been imported recently.