Important: Safety Warning
This page states that certain wild plants are safe to eat. Its identifications and edibility claims are more than a century old and in some cases simply wrong, and deadly look-alikes exist for many edible species. Never eat a wild plant on the strength of this text.
This page prescribes plants as medicine according to pre-modern medical theory. Several of the plants named are toxic, correct identification is difficult, and the doses given have no scientific basis. Do not ingest or apply any preparation described here.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Chestnut
OF all known Nuts the Spanish Chestnut (Stover Nut, or Meat Nut) is the most farinaceous, or starchy, and the least oily, so that it is more easy of digestion than any other. Italian Chestnut Cakes contain 40 per cent of nutritious matter, and Chestnut flour, when properly prepared, are capital food for children. The ripe Chestnut possesses a fine creamy flavour, and if roasted this Nut becomes almost aromatic. The diet of diet of Italian poor people consists chiefly of Chestnuts during the autumn and winter, when these are eaten roasted, or prepared like a stew with gravy. Likewise in Corea the Chestnut has almost the same popular place for food as the potato occupies with the Irish. To make a Chestnut purée, take two pounds of good sound Chestnuts, cut the tops off, and put the nuts to bake for about twenty minutes; then remove the shells, and skins; put the nuts into a stewpan, with enough light stock to make of a pale lemon shade; add salt, and some castor sugar, also a pat of butter; simmer till the nuts are tender, then pound them, and rub them through a fine wire sieve, mixing them with a little cream (and anisette, if liked); work into a smooth paste, put it into a forcing-bag with a large rose pipe, and use. For convalescents after a protracted illness, the French make a chocolate of sweet Chestnuts which is highly restorative. In olden times Chestnuts were common rations supplied to our soldiers; and when it seemed probable that a castle would be besieged, out went the soldiers and laid violent hands on all the stores of Chestnuts within ready reach. Nowadays in Italy, and elsewhere on the Continent, meat having become a luxury, Chestnuts are the staple food of the people. "Hodge-Podge," or "Hotch-Potch," is a ragoût made with Chestnuts. For Chestnut soup (according to an old Italian recipe), "finely chop two small onions, one carrot, two leeks, and a quarter stick of celery; fry with butter until browned; add one quart of stock, three or four cloves, and salt to taste; stew over a slow fire for one hour. Take three or four dozen Chestnuts, according to size, and peel off the outside husk; then place them in an ordinary stewpan, stirring them about until they are sufficiently cooked for removal of the second envelope, or shell; stew them for half-an-hour in half the prepared liquor; put apart some whole Chestnuts to garnish the soup; chop the remainder, and strain them through a sieve with the liquor they have been boiled in; add the remainder of the prepared stock; stew over a slow fire for six or seven minutes; place the whole Chestnuts in the tureen, and pour the soup over." Steak and Chestnuts is a capital food combination for completing recovery after a long illness. Boil one pound of Chestnuts until they are soft; remove the shells, and husks, and make the nuts smooth with a wooden spoon; add to them one pound of very finely minced juicy beef (rejecting all skin, gristle, etc.); season the mixture with salt, pepper (red and white), and mustard to taste; also add half-an-ounce of grated parsley, one shalot (finely minced), and about a dessertspoonful of finely-scraped horse-radish ; make it into a paste with four or five eggs; press it rather firmly down in a deep dish, and make pretty devices on the top; lay little lumps of butter (about two ounces altogether) here and there, and either bake it in a good hot oven, or roast it before the fire; it should be of a warm, brown colour, and must be served very hot.
Professor Andrew Smith, of New York, found that roasted Chestnuts, when eaten, signally lessen the quantity of albumin in the urine of patients suffering from what is known as Bright's disease of the kidneys, this effect being largely due to the tannic acid which the Chestnuts contain. "Take some Chestnuts, and make a small incision in the skin of each one; throw them into boiling water, and let them remain until tender; remove the shells, and skins; dry the Chestnuts in the oven, and afterwards reduce them to powder by pounding in a mortar; the powder may be made hot again, and then served as a vegetable." Similarly at St. Petersburg it has been shown that roasted Italian Chestnuts have a marked effect in diminishing the albumin excreted in the urine of such patients. A good way to cook these Chestnuts is to boil them for twenty minutes, and then place them in a Dutch oven for five more minutes. "Zounds," cried Phutatorius (Tristram Shandy, Cap. xxvii., Sterne), "when a roasted chestnut, piping hot, rolled from the table into that particular aperture of his small clothes, for which-to the shame of our language be it spoke, - there is no chaste word throughout all Johnson's Dictionary; that particular aperture which the laws of decorum do strictly require like the Temple of Janus (in peace, at least) to be universally shut up." Americans consider sweet Chestnuts, and likewise leaves from the tree, excellent for staying the paroxysms of whooping cough. Continental confectioners dip the cooked nuts into clarified sugar, converting them thus into sweetmeats. The Chestnuts contain 50 per cent of starch. Californian Indians make a very liberal use for food purposes of the Horse Chestnut (Hippocastaneus æsculus), from which nuts they produce both porridge and bread, the flour being first well washed so as to extract the tannin from it, and then boiled like oatmeal; or it is mixed with red clay so that the oil may be absorbed, and afterwards it is baked in loaves. In New England, as well as in this country, the Horse Chestnut, by its nut, supplies a most serviceable medicine against chronic constipation of the bowels, and for the cure of sluggish piles. 66 CHICORY. (See COFFEE.) THE Wild Chicory, or Succory (Cichorium), is an English roadside plant, with flowers (white, or blue), and which is also called Turnsole," a Sunflower. Its fresh root is bitter, with a milky juice which is somewhat aperient, and slightly sedative; whilst on good authority the plant has been pronounced useful against pulmonary consumption. In Germany it is known as Wegwort, "waiting on the way," being by repute a metamorphosed Princess watching for her faithless lover. When cultivated, the root grows to be large, and constitutes Chicory, as used abundantly in France for blending with the coffee berry. This plant when wild was known to the Romans in the days of Horace, being then eaten as a vegetable, or in salads : -"Me pascunt olivæ, Me cichorea, levesque malvæ."
Virgil also tells of the Amaris intuba fibris. And in modern
Three workable recipes sit inside this essay: a sweetened chestnut purée for piping, an Italian-style chestnut soup, and a baked beef-and-chestnut loaf. The medical framing around them should be ignored entirely, and one nut named on the page is not food at all.
- Peel them hot, or not at allThe hinge of every chestnut recipe here is the inner skin, or pellicle. It slips off only while the nut is still steaming; once it cools it welds to the flesh and you will lose half the kernel prising it away. Work through a few at a time and keep the rest covered.
- Score before heatingThe instruction to "cut the tops off" and to "make a small incision in the skin of each one" is not decorative. An unscored chestnut traps steam and bursts, in the oven or in the pan.
- Weights and yieldsTwo pounds of chestnuts in the shell gives roughly a pound and a half of peeled nut, enough purée to fill a piping bag. "Three or four dozen Chestnuts, according to size" for the soup may be anything from about a pound to two pounds in the shell, depending how large they are; the recipe gives no number of servings.
- Oven heatA "good hot oven" in a book of this date is usually read as somewhere around 400-450F. No temperature is given for baking the nuts before peeling; a hot oven of that order suits the twenty minutes stated. For the beef and chestnut dish a moderate 350-375F is easier to control, since the point is to set the egg without drying the meat.
- The beef loaf needs a thermometerNo baking time is given for the steak and chestnut mixture at all. It is a fresh minced-beef loaf bound with egg and should be cooked to 160F at the centre, which for a mixture pressed into a deep dish generally means 45 minutes to an hour. "A warm, brown colour" on top tells you nothing about the middle.
- Four or five eggs is a lotFor two pounds of combined meat and chestnut paste, three eggs is usually plenty of binding. Five will give a texture closer to a savoury custard than a loaf.
- Vessels and equipmentA "stewpan" is a wide, straight-sided saucepan. A "forcing-bag with a large rose pipe" is a piping bag with a large star tip. The "Dutch oven" of this text is a reflector shield set in front of an open fire, not a lidded cast-iron pot; a hot conventional oven does the same finishing job.
- IngredientsCastor sugar is superfine sugar. "Light stock" means an unsalted pale veal or chicken stock, added only until the purée takes on a lemon tint, so start with a few spoonfuls. Anisette is an anise liqueur and is optional. A shalot is a shallot. "Spanish Chestnut" is the sweet chestnut, Castanea sativa, sold today as Italian, Spanish or marron chestnut.
- Horse chestnut is not an ingredientThe closing paragraphs describe horse chestnut (Aesculus) porridge, bread and laxative dosing. Horse chestnut seeds contain aesculin and related saponins and are toxic to humans; the washing and clay treatments described are not a reliable detoxification. Do not eat them, and disregard the medicinal use as well.
- The kidney claimsThe assertions about roasted chestnuts reducing albumin in Bright's disease, and about chestnut leaves easing whooping cough, are pre-modern clinical anecdote with no support. Treat the chestnuts as starch and flavour, nothing more.
Meals Medicinal belongs to a genre that treated the larder as a dispensary, and chestnuts were an easy case to argue: at roughly half their dry weight in starch and very low in oil, they behave more like a grain than a nut, which is exactly why chestnut flour underpinned mountain diets in Tuscany, Corsica and the Cévennes long after wheat became affordable in the lowlands. The castagnaccio and chestnut-flour cakes the author calls "Italian Chestnut Cakes" come from that tradition of the chestnut as bread-tree, and the note that meat had "become a luxury" on the Continent reflects real late-Victorian anxiety about European rural diet. The reference to soldiers seizing chestnut stores before a siege is folk history rather than documented supply record, though chestnuts did keep tolerably in cool cellars, which is more than could be said for most autumn food. The passage is also poignantly timed: the American chestnut blight was identified in New York around 1904, within a year or two of this book, and within a few decades the tree that had made chestnuts a common American street food was effectively gone, leaving the imported Italian and Spanish nuts the author praises as the ones we still buy.