LEARNING BY ACCIDENT & CHESTNUTS

Learning by accident - you start heading in one direction and before you know it, you’re off on an entirely different tangent. Travel often does that, the road trip in which a stop for ice cream at a country store turns into an episode of the Waltons, and you learn about the trials and tribulations of the family that founded the shop and has owned it for generations and “yes that’s their daughter with the multiple body piercings who just served you,” and “yes she plays in that band that you saw in the pub,” and before you know it, the conversation has gone from ice cream to indie music and everyone is someone’s new best friend.

Sometimes the experience is more like walking onto the set of Deliverance, and that serves to remind you that suburbia really is good place to live, and maybe it’s time to review some of that jiu-jitsu training.

Cookbooks are another great source of accidental learning. For example, I’ve never given chestnuts much thought, beyond the fact that they’re a key ingredient in Christmas turkey stuffing, but here’s what I learned today from The Frugal Gourmet Cooks Three Ancient Cuisines. China, Greece and Rome and Wikipedia:

• Chestnut trees live for hundreds of years
• They produce the best nuts at 60 years 
• In 1904 a blight hit the chestnut trees in the US and by 1940 few trees remained 
• Ancient Greeks wrote of the medicinal properties of chestnuts—and of the flatulence induced by eating too much of it 
• To the early Christians, chestnuts symbolized chastity
• Until the introduction of the potato, whole forest-dwelling communities which had scarce access to wheat flour relied on chestnuts as their main source of carbohydrates.

The trees were a popular subject among European painters:

Camille Pissarro - The Chestnut Trees at Osny ~ 1873

And they figure in Haiku:

stillness - a chestnut leaf sinks - through the clear water.  Ryuin (died ~ 1690)

Matsuo Basho (died ~ 1694) had lots to say about chestnuts, but I like this one:

departing autumn - with hands spread open - chestnut burs

 I won't ever look at turkey dressing in quite the same way again.