Production Practices and Quality Assessment of Food Crops. Vol. 1

CHESTNUT, AN ANCIENT CROP WITH FUTURE
S. PEREIRA-LORENZO AND A. M. RAMOS-CABRER
Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Escola Politécnica Superior, Departamento de Producción
Vegetal, Campus de Lugo, 27002 Lugo, Spain
1. INTRODUCTION
Chestnut is a multipurpose tree valued for its nut, timber, tannins, as well as forestry
landscape. It is distributed mainly in the North Hemisphere (Figure 1), mostly in
China, Korea and Japan in the Asia, in Southern-Europe from Turkey to Atlantic
Islands and in the United States. It was only recently introduced into Chile,
Argentina, Australia and New Zealand.
Chestnut season is traditionally consumed in the autumn and is considered as a
fruit announcing the winter arrival. Nuts are usually roasted directly in the fire
and consumed with wine as a celebration of the harvest. During Christmas, it is
also traditionally used as filling accompaniment for the roast meat. It is also
transformed into a luxury product in ‘marron glace’, an expensive form of candy.
Timber, often coming from grafted orchards is a much-loved hardwood, appreciated
for its durability and the nice patina in furnitures. Chestnut was more important
in Medieval Ages as the nuts could be conserved dried or as flour as a winter
food source. At the same time, the tree also produced timber wood for tools,
Figure 1. World distribution of chestnut area.
R. Dris and S. M. Jain (eds.), Production Practices and Quality Assessment of Food Crops,
Vol. 1, 1–20 “Preharvest Practice”, pp. 105–161.
© 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
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