72 A TREATISE ON NUT CUI/TURE. 



Chestnuts are required to make one gallon of bleached Chestnuts. By the 

 way, Chestnuts so dried keep a long time, and are packed either in sacks or 

 hogsheads. 



THE FOREIGN VARIETIES. The common European Chestnut, whether 

 French, Italian or Spanish, is small, flat on both sides at least half of them 

 and grows generally four to eight in one burr. This is the kind that is dried 

 hard and bleached for the making of meal and flour; bread, cake and a deli- 

 cious mush, eaten with milk, being made with it. The cultivated Chestnut 

 the kind raised for dessert and market, and which is either roasted or boiled 

 is the Marron. It grows generally single or in pairs, sometimes three in one 

 burr. Apropos, I could not but smile in going over r.ome Eastern nursery 

 catalogues to read about Chestnuts bearing as many as four to six nuts in a 

 burr, the nurserymen laying a stress on so many nuts found in burrs. Well, 

 that is a defect, if raising nuts for market, for the less nuts in the burr the 

 larger and, consequently, the more marketable are the nuts, the same with 

 Walnuts ; kinds that bear large nuts may, for instance, yield less nuts per tree, 

 though the same quantity in bushels or pounds. Anyway, as small nuts are 

 almost unmarketable, or, at the best, held at very low prices, it is much more 

 profitable to raise large nuts, which are always marketable and at fair prices. 

 jSo it is with Chestnuts. 



The Marrons, the largest Chestnuts raised, have a glossy shell, and, when 

 roasted or boiled, the inner skin comes off nicely. If roasted, a small incision 

 should be made with a knife at the small end, to prevent the nut from burst- 

 ing open with a loud report ; if boiled, the shell should be first removed and 

 then boiled in water the same as potatoes. They are delicious cooked both 

 ways. Our confectioners are now roasting them in their peanut roasters, and 

 people seem to take well to them. A Thanksgiving turkey stuffed with chest- 

 nuts is getting to be quite a la mode up here in this Chestnut-growing region, 

 and is a capital dish ; and I predict that in a given time, when Marrons will be 

 grown plentifully in California, as they should already be, every Thanksgiving 

 turkey on this privileged coast will be stuffed with chestnuts. 



IMPORTANCE OF THE CHESTNUT TRADE. The Chestnut trade in France, 

 Italy, Turkey and other countries of Southern Europe is simply immense. In 

 Central France the Chestnut is called the "bread tree," and some years there 

 is such an abundance of nuts that cattle are also fed w r ith them. The average 

 production of a grafted Chestnut or Marron in full bearing is estimated at sixty 

 kilograms (one hundred and twelve American pounds. ) T have a Marron Com- 

 bale Chestnut tree on my place, planted in the Spring of 1871, which averages 

 ninety pounds of nuts per year, for which I have refused fifteen cents per 

 pound ; last year that tree yielded one hundred pounds of nuts, but only seventy 

 pounds this year, which decrease in yield was surely due to our exceptionally 



