Chestnuts
The American chestnut is native to a large area of the United States and its range covers more than 200 million acres from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico. Uses of the American Chestnut goes to pre-Colombian times when the Indians ate the nuts raw or pounded, boiled them to make lumps of doughy bread or mixed them into corn bread. In 1612, Captain John Smith recorded the Indians boiled chestnuts for four hours and made both broth and bread with the nuts. Later, settlers would use the chestnut timber for farm fencing and furniture. As the country progressed chestnut lumber was used for telephone poles and railroad ties. Extracts made from bark and trunk was used as a source of tannin for the leather industry. Fresh chestnuts were used for fattening up their hogs and other livestock.
At the beginning of the 20th century, a canker bark disease was brought in from the Orient with some Asian chestnut tree stock. The blight attacked in 1904 and over the next 50 years virtually all American chestnuts trees in the United States were destroyed. It was spread by microscopic spores carried by the wind, birds and insects. A parasite in the spores would attack the tree through fistures in the bark and the encircle the limbs and cause it to die. After that most of the chestnuts sold in America were imported from Italy. The varieties imported were larger than what was grown in the United States but not as sweet.
The chestnut has the lowest fat content of all the main edible nuts with only 4 to 5 percent fat. The chestnut is also high in carbohydrates making it more similar to cereal grains, such as wheat than to other nuts. Chestnuts are starchier than oily and easily digestible when boiled or roasted. They are also very low in calories at 1700 calories per pound where as in comparison pecans contain 3100 calories per pound.
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