It’s not all about roasting on an open fire – there’s so much more you can do with chestnuts
If I’d ever spared a thought for how chestnuts – the sweet, edible kind, not the combative horsey sort – were harvested, I would probably have conjured rosy-cheeked peasants bent low in ancient forests and filling rough-hewn hessian sacks by hand.Back-breaking labour, sure, but so picturesque!I was delighted, therefore, while on a writing retreat in Umbria last month, to get the opportunity to watch an elderly couple manoeuvre a giant vacuum around their haphazard orchard, followed by their furious sheepdog.The fallen crop was sucked into a giant fan that spat their bristly jackets back out on to the ground, and the nuts then went to be sorted by other family members on a conveyor belt in the barn – the good ones to be sold in the shell, the less perfect specimens swiftly dropped into a bucket for processing.Later in the week, a lorry turned up in the village square to pick up bags from other small local producers, and that evening I roasted a pan of chestnuts on the fire with new appreciation, while loudly bemoaning the disappearance from the streets of London of the chestnut sellers of my childhood (though this makes me sound positively Dickensian, I can confirm that I’m talking about this century.Note also that Nigel Slater is less starry-eyed on the subject.
)If you’ve never eaten chestnuts hot from the shell – or if, like me, it’s been a while since you’ve done so – I urge you to seek them out, even just once.The vacuum-packed, ready-cooked and peeled sort are, of course, extremely convenient, and ideal for the likes of Jacob Kenedy’s grandmother’s braised quail with chestnuts, or his dad’s boozy montebianco dessert, but they’re a quite different beast from the sweetly smoky, roasted variety, so fresh that you scald your fingers on them and don’t care.Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has some sage advice (and a sagey chestnut stuffing recipe) on the subject from 2006, and I doubt much has changed in that department in the past 20 years.Though the season’s over by then, the nut’s association with Christmas means that net bags of chestnuts have already made their annual appearance in greengrocers and supermarkets, no doubt as much for their decorative value as their fibre content.My editor has yet to be convinced of the chestnut’s merits – mealy, he says.
And, indeed, they were once an important subsistence starch in hilly regions such as Umbria and Tuscany, where to this day the ground nuts pop up in cakes (OK, this one’s Ligurian) and cookies (such as Giuseppe Dell’Anno’s castagnotti, pictured top), pasta (Giorgio Locatelli has a lovely sounding recipe with wild mushrooms), breads and soups (such as this Rachel Roddy number),But I’d argue that any such tendency to powderiness is, like so many issues in life, helped by the liberal addition of fat, as proved by Yotam Ottolenghi’s buttery chestnut frangipane tart, Angela Hartnett’s smoky bacon and ricotta fettuccine and Rachel’s buttery rice with pumpkin and sage,As a one-woman chestnut marketing board for Britain, I hope this tempting selection makes it clear that the chestnut is not just for Christmas,Even Nigel’s inspired sausage and sauerkraut take from 2022 or Yotam’s satisfyingly named stuffing muffins from 2017 would work with a roast chicken or an equally seasonal game bird such as Blanche Vaughan’s pot-roast pheasant,So, if you spot some chestnuts at the shops this weekend, hoover them up.
Hessian sack and sheepdog entirely optional.Prime cuts | I’m sorry to report that the burger at chef Jackson Boxer’s Notting Hill outpost, Dove, is as glorious as rumours suggest.Sorry because, as it’s made with the offcuts from their 50-day-aged bavette steak, there are only a limited number available per service, and when they’re gone, they’re gone.Book for the first sitting, get there early and order it immediately.Juicy, fatty and intensely beefy, it really is that good.
Sign up to FeastRecipes from all our star cooks, seasonal eating ideas and restaurant reviews.Get our best food writing every weekafter newsletter promotionCool beans | Or, perhaps, the best ratio of effort to pleasure: jarred cannellini beans tossed with Marmite butter, then served on toasted sourdough and topped with grated cheddar.The Food Foundation has launched Bang in Some Beans, a campaign backed by the likes of Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall to double UK bean consumption by 2028 – though they’re good for both us and the planet, two-thirds of the population eat less than a single portion per week.Not me, though.I love them.
All the food that’s fit to print | As someone who came of age in the last glory days of print, I’m delighted by its recent renaissance in the world of food,We may have lost Delicious magazine this year, but we’ve gained an occasional print version of Vittles, while the Pit team recently produced perhaps my favourite issue yet, on American food, featuring Uyen Luu on Vietnamese diaspora cooking in California, Chiara Arellano on the Black Panthers’ breakfast clubs and Annie Cheng on the history of Mississippi Delta cuisine,There’s also a recipe for my beloved deep-dish pizza, among others,You, too, can order it here,Dinner party inspiration | I’m throwing a dinner party in tribute to the late and much-missed Jilly Cooper this week, so I very much enjoyed digging into the archives for inspiration: this admission, from a 2002 interview about her beloved local pub, the Bear Inn in Bisley, Gloucestershire, furnished me with the starter: “They know that I’m permanently on a diet, so they will do eggs, lettuce and carrots for me specially.
” Just add a pleasingly 1980s avocado dip (no doubt too much naughty cholesterol for Jilly) and it’s a fine prelude to coq (up) au vin and a sloe gin-infused fruit salad (apparently the only pudding in Jilly’s repertoire, and described by literary agent Felicity Blunt as a “truly lethal … truth serum”).Rest in raucous peace, Jilly.We will be raising a glass to you.If you want to read the complete version of this newsletter please subscribe to receive Feast in your inbox every Thursday
Call for inquiry after families stripped of child benefit due to flawed travel data
Calls are being made for an urgent independent inquiry after thousands of families were stripped of child benefit due to flawed Home Office travel data that claimed to show parents going on holidays and not returning.Andrew Snowden, the Conservative MP for Fylde and the party’s assistant whip, said the government “must take immediate and transparent action” to address the failures of the anti-fraud benefits crackdown.“Thousands of families have had essential child benefit payments wrongly suspended because of unreliable or incomplete data,” he said.Snowden called for “a full, independent review of how this system was authorised, including how such unreliable travel data was used to make decisions on family benefits”. He said the findings must be published in full
‘I was scared’: parents reveal stress of HMRC’s child benefit errors
Demands to pay back thousands of pounds in child benefit, claims of emigration after a serious case of sepsis and a complaints unit that is indifferent to the emotional impact of its errors.Here parents tell of their experiences of being caught up in the HMRC anti-fraud debacle.Tetiana fled the war in Ukraine in 2022 with some of her family including her brother, Roman, who is paraplegic, for whom she is now a full-time carer, and baby who was born in 2021.In October, she was shocked to receive a letter telling her she could be liable to pay back £3,706.35 in child benefit because she had “moved to Ukraine permanently”
‘It was the last time Mum smiled at me’: the choirs singing to the dying in three-part harmony
A worldwide movement to sing gentle songs to the dying provides comfort, peace and release to both the suffering and the singersIt’s a warm morning in suburban Ballina, in northern New South Wales, and Joy Hurnall is lying in a recliner in her lounge room, wearing a pale blue dressing gown and a woollen shawl made by her daughter Cheryl.Having been discharged from the palliative care unit of a local hospital the previous day, the 92-year-old is relieved to be back home, surrounded by people she loves: her cousin and best friend since childhood, three of her six adult children, and dozens of long-gone relatives smiling down from framed black-and-white photographs in the bookcase behind her.The small room is full but quiet, the air infused with the gentle voices of three women from Ballina’s Threshold Choir who have come to sing to Joy. She closes her eyes and rests her hands on her lap, listening.For the next 20 minutes, the women sing four lullaby-like songs with names as soothing as they sound: You Are Not Alone, Love Transcends, Healing Light and You Are So Loved
‘There is a gap where Alex should be’: the young woman who lost her life in a neglectful prison system
“There is a gap or a space where Alex should be,” Stacie Davies said. “Wherever I am, she’s not there.”At just 25 years old, her daughter, Alex Davies, was found dead in her segregation cell at Styal prison in Cheshire on Christmas Eve last year.She had been sent to prison after pleading guilty to offences including criminal damage and possession of a knife, which she had committed while in mental health crisis.The expectation was that when Alex was sentenced, she would receive a hospital order, and four separate psychiatrists had supported a recommendation that she be transferred to hospital before sentence
AI, Covid and taxes: what is behind steep rise in youth unemployment?
Youth unemployment is at the highest level since the Covid pandemic, as younger people bear the brunt of a worsening slowdown in the UK jobs market.Excluding the peak recorded during the autumn of 2020, when the country was entering the second pandemic lockdown, the jobless rate for 16 to 24-year-olds – running at 15.3% – is at the highest level in a decade.There are a multitude of reasons why young people are struggling to find work – including the lasting scars of the Covid pandemic, rising mental health issues, the rise of artificial intelligence and tax increases. Here we dive into the details
‘It’s so demoralising’: UK graduates exasperated by high unemployment
It has been more than six months since Leah Savage, 24, started job hunting and despite applying for almost 100 jobs, she has had just two interviews in that time.“It’s so demoralising. All I do is wake up and apply for jobs. I reach out to different people and everyone says the same thing – they’re not hiring at the moment,” she said. “It’s a real struggle
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Colbert on Trump and Epstein: ‘They were best pals and underage girls was Epstein’s whole thing’
Colbert on Trump ‘building a massive compensation for his weird tiny penis’
‘I really enjoyed it’: new RSC curriculum brings Shakespeare’s works to life in UK classrooms
Jon Stewart on government shutdown deal: ‘A world-class collapse by Democrats’
Old is M Night Shyamalan at his best: ambitious, abrasive and surprisingly poignant