Whatever happened to roasted chestnuts?
A brief history of a famous and (possibly) fading wintertime snack
Hello, Snackers. We’re back! It’s been too long. I was sick, things were weird, and … now it's December, so let’s talk about chestnuts roasting on an open fire.
Coming soon: I have some fun posts lined up for you in the coming weeks, including the tale of an infamous candy from a book you’ve probably read, notes on random restaurants, a history of finger food (but not the kind you’re thinking of), and more.
I’ll also get back on track with bonus posts for paid subscribers, so …
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We have to start by talking about Nat King Cole. My kids love Christmas music, so we’ve been listening to lots of it lately, but after a few repeats of “Here Comes Santa Claus” and “Jingle Bells,” I mostly tune out the playlist. But when Nat comes on, he has my full attention. God, that man could sing. Just the silkiest voice ever recorded, the richness offset by a hint of rasp that made it all the more enthralling. When he’s singing, I listen and savor. I’ve heard “The Christmas Song” at least fifty times this month and my ears perk up every time I hear the opening line. You know the one: “Chestnuuuuts roasting on an open fiiiire.”
A few days ago, I started to wonder about those roasted chestnuts and their backstory. I had a vague sense that they used to be a big deal in American culture around Christmastime, a snacking staple prepared in home fireplaces and sold by vendors on urban sidewalks across the land. But clearly something has changed—they’re a rarity now. I have no idea where to buy raw chestnuts and I’ve never seen anyone selling them on the street or from a modern Instagram-savvy food truck.
What happened?
When I started digging, I quickly found some answers, and for a moment I thought this would be a straightforward post to write—perfect for a return after a long break. Then I dug some more and those initial answers looked less and less complete, which was both frustrating (more work, ugh) and also kinda great (better story, yay).
Let’s dig in.
Let me introduce you to Geminian. He was a roast-chestnut vendor in Italy around 400 years ago and, if this engraving by Francesco Villamena is to be believed, he possessed a bellowing voice for the ages. Here's a translation of the inscription at the bottom, via the Princeton Graphic Arts Collection:
I am Geminian, the roast chestnut seller
who wants to make my name known to the world
And why not, in shouting I have no equal
With my voice I make hell tremble.O well-done barrel [belly], so dear to me
Portrayed only to make me more joyful
Being seen today by so many
I glory only in my happy state.
I include this not only for the sake of celebrating the arts but also as visual proof that roasted chestnuts have been a popular street food for a long time. In China, there’s evidence that people were snacking on chestnuts more than 2,000 years ago, before the Han Dynasty. Where there are chestnuts, you’ll find people eating them.
According to The Tasting Table, the specific association between chestnuts and Christmas in the USA and Europe also goes back centuries and comes in part from the basic timing of the season in which people eat chestnuts, and in part from St. Martin of Tours:
Much like rice and canned foods today, the poor were given chestnuts on Martinstag aka the Feast of Saint Martin, which falls on November 11. … The story goes that, while stationed in Rome, Saint Martin cut his jacket in half to share with a beggar who was freezing in the wintertime. This act became known as “Dividing of the Cloak,” and is celebrated on Martinstag with songs and bonfires as an act of goodwill. Handing out chestnuts also became a Martinstag activity, as the season that these nutritious nuts become edible coincides with the time St. Martin is celebrated (chestnuts are ready to eat from roughly October to December).
You know where you can find the tastiest chestnuts, supposedly? The USA. American chestnut trees (Castanea dentata, if you want to be technical) have nuts that are, apparently, smaller and sweeter than their siblings around the world. The trees used to be plentiful from New England south across Appalachia and into the Deep South (here’s a range map); the trees were tall and bountiful, with the larger ones producing some 6,000 chestnuts every year. Native Americans prepared chestnuts in different ways, including crushing them into flour, and when Europeans showed up, they quickly added chestnuts to their own diets. The nuts were cheap (free if you had access to a tree), abundant, and delicious—the snacking trifecta.
By the turn of the twentieth century, roasted-chestnut vendors were a common sight across the USA, especially in the larger cities. Many, perhaps most, of the vendors were European immigrants, often from Italy or Greece, who were essentially extending the street-food legacies of their homelands, where roasted chestnuts were still going strong centuries after Geminian the Loud-Voiced.
But around 1904, American chestnut trees started dying off in alarming numbers. The cause, first identified by the chief gardener at the Bronx Zoo, was a fungus believed to have arrived in the USA via imported chestnut trees from Japan.
By 1910, the grim reality was readily apparent to all observers: American chestnut trees were “doomed.”
The blight killed some four billion American chestnut trees by 1950—but even long before then, people were having a hard time finding any that were still standing. Here’s the Washington, DC Evening Star in 1924:
In my initial research, I found several internet stories about the sharp decline of roasted chestnuts, and in nearly every case, this is where the story ended (here’s one example of many). In short: A blight came and wiped out all the trees, and people essentially stopped eating chestnuts.
But as I was poking around the newspaper archives and historic photos, I kept finding indicators that this narrative was incomplete.
American chestnuts may have almost disappeared before World War II, but roasted-chestnut vendors continued to stick around—in the dozens of newspaper accounts I found from the 1950s and 1960s, there was every indication that it was still a perfectly viable trade.
A Baltimore Sun story published in 1961 shed some light on what was happening. It’s fascinating, so I’ll quote at length:
Gotham’s Chestnut Vendors
Now that winter is here, New York’s chestnut vendors are back in business. The chestnut man is a traditional part of Gotham’s winter scene.
Bundled up against the cold, he roasts and sells his wares on a tiny pushcart usually made from an old baby buggy. A charcoal burner is built into one end, a metal or wooden lid serves as a counter, and extra sacks of chestnuts and coal are stored in the cushioned interior.
According to the New York Convention and Visitors Bureau, this cold-weather “carriage trade” is carried on by some 75 to 100 hardy folk.
The smell of fresh hot-roasted chestnuts is their only advertisement, but they do a brisk business at curbstones and in doorways in many parts of the Big Town. Most of them can be found in midtown Manhattan, the Wall Street area, Greenwich Village and at the entrances to parks and museums.
Business is especially good on clear crisp days, when shoppers, school children and homeward-bound commuters buy the nuts for a tasty snack—and the opportunity to warm their hands.
Between sales, the chestnut man constantly turns and stirs the roasting nuts with a pair of tongs, adds charcoal to the fire, and prepares fresh nuts by splitting their skins with a knife. Most of the vendors charge 25 cents a bag, each bag filled to order with nuts plucked hot from the roasting pan.
Chestnuts, widely used in this country only a generation ago, all but disappeared from American dinner tables after our chestnut trees were wiped out by a blight. The chestnut tradition lingered on in New York, thanks to immigrant vendors and grocers who sold chestnuts imported from Europe.
That last line (italics mine) changes the narrative quite a bit!
To recap: In the early 1960s, New York had close to 100 roast-chestnut vendors—perhaps fewer than there had been in earlier times, but the article gives no indication of decline or concern—and their ongoing success came because consumers were perfectly content to buy non-American chestnuts, in spite of their supposedly inferior taste and texture.
As I scrolled through the decades on Newspapers.com, it wasn’t until I reached the early 1970s that I saw a trend of stories noting a sharp decline in the number of vendors, with reporters searching the vendors’ longstanding territory and finding one or none still around, as in this story from the New York Daily News in 1970:
For your gift-giving consideration, the Snack Stack merch is now open.
We’ve got t-shirts, we’ve got stickers, we’ve got socks in the exact color of various hand pie foods around the world …
So a new question arises. If Americans were perfectly content to eat imported chestnuts, why did roasted chestnuts finally fade away? It’s not clear.
It’s possible that food carts as a broad category began to decline in the late 1960s, perhaps due to city crackdowns, although I haven’t found any evidence to support this hypothesis, and according to City Journal, New York implemented food-cart restrictions during this era but they didn’t stick at all.
Perhaps roasted chestnuts simply fell out of favor. There appears to have been a sense of nostalgia attached to them across the decades—even in the 1960s, the newspaper coverage discussed them as something that reminded consumers of a bygone era. In some cases, reporters even mentioned the Nat King Cole song, drawing an indirect line between the musical and culinary threads of cultural memory. Some dishes endure and some don’t; food, like everything, is ever-evolving, and the roasted-chestnut moment started to fade away for good sometime around 1970. (You can still find them, supposedly, at the occasional holiday market and in similar venues.)
The decline of roasted chestnuts as an American street food is especially confusing because they seem to be doing just fine in many other parts of the world, even now.
When I searched Getty Images for graphics to accompany this story, I found all dozens of recent photos from China, France, Italy, Turkey (below), and elsewhere.
I’m not sure how many data points I need to convince you that roasted chestnuts are absolutely still a thing on the streets of cities outside the USA, but …
Here’s one from 2022 about a famous roasted-chestnut stand in Shibuya, Tokyo.
And in May of this year, “a 62-year-old man was fined S$27,600 (US$20,800) for illegally selling roasted chestnuts near bus stops and other public places.”
In the USA, roasted chestnuts may have gone the way of Santa shilling for Pall Mall cigarettes, but outside this country, they’re still very much a thing.
There are efforts underway to bring back the American chestnut tree—and with it, those famously delicious chestnuts. But as American consumers of the 1960s knew full well, and as countless citizens of other nations understand right now, there are plenty of other chestnuts that you can roast and consume quite happily.
The roasted chestnut is not dead and never was. It just might need a loud, persuasive spokesperson to revive the brand in the USA, a modern Geminian to sell a timeless product.
Happy snacking!
—Doug
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