A Refresher in Field Biology

In early October, many trees around here began dropping loads of beautiful, shiny brown nuts. I watched kids and their parents at the park loading bags and boxes of gathered nuts into waiting wagons. It seemed like a perfect fall activity--the kiddos go on a treasure hunt, the adults catch up on adult conversation, and everybody goes home with...nuts.

almost as fun as Easter eggs

making off with the spoils

So I got in on the action.

Aren't they pretty?

I read online about the nuts, called Kastanien in German, and all my German-English dictionaries indicated that these were chestnuts. Having never seen chestnuts before (that I can remember), I happily looked up recipes and began to roast the nuts.

But they were horrible. Like, blech, patooey, ack, not even going to taste it twice, nasty.

So I did even more research, and it turned out that I had picked up what we would call horse chestnuts and what the Germans call Roßkastanien or Kastanien. They are technically edible and were used in the past for medicinal purposes, but they give you the trots. (Needless to say, I was happy I only had a few nibbles!) The sweet chestnuts, the ones that we hear about roasting over an open fire, are called Maronen or Esskastanien in German. Really, the nuts look quite similar:

top row: buckeye/Kastanien, bottom row: sweet chestnuts/Maronen

 The key to telling the difference is in the foliage and conkers:

left: horse chestnut (Kastanie), right: sweet chestnut (Maroni) (source)

About  3 weeks after the fake chestnuts covered the sidewalks and parks, the real chestnuts appeared in the markets and I finally got some tasty ones! Picking your own food, for free, always makes it taste better....except in this case.

So I roasted the nuts, then chopped them, ate a few, and stuck them in the fridge. They have been delicious additions to boiled potatoes, a creamy rice dish, soups, and salads. It was quite a bit of work to get them out of their shells, though, so I have since found little packets of pre-cooked vacuum-packed chestnuts at the grocery store that work just as well

My field biology at instructor at Cornell would probably be ashamed at my rusty field identification skills. I was a bit embarrassed about the whole thing! And also confused...what would so many people do with that many inedible nuts? So a searched 'Warum sammeln Kastanien?' (Why gather buckeyes?), and I found out that they often are used for crafts, especially making little figures out of buckeyes and toothpicks.

source

a storefront in Vienna - the pastries are made with sweet chestnuts, but the
figure was decorated with horse chestnuts

But--more interestingly--the gummy bear manufacturer Haribo will give you a kilo of gummy bears for 10 kg of Kastanien (or 5 kg of acorns)! Also, many 'Wildparks' will give you free admission or a certain amount of cash per kilo in exchange for gathered Kastanien, since wild animals like to eat them and it saves the parks money on food. Of course, I found all this out after I had dumped by stash of horse chestnuts!

Oh well--I still enjoyed them. Shiny and slightly iridescent, they sure are pretty even if they taste horrible :)