ISSUE 79, FOODS OF FLORIDA, Part 4: Florida's Chestnut--The Dunstan
Florida’s Chestnut—the Dunstan
The forests of towering American chestnut trees are gone, blighted and cleared from the land a century ago. The American chestnuts grew tall and straight, and journals from the hill country of North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and North Georgia tell of the cathedral quiet of a stand in late summer, and the cannonade of dropping burrs at nutfall. It was a common experience that has vanished from the lives of Americans. I’ve long wanted to take that walk through the hardwood sanctuary during the season when the chestnuts became ripe.
Eight years ago, in August 2015, I had as close an experience as one can have. Florida chestnut grower Joel Kersey invited me to walk a widow grove of Dunstan chestnuts growing near High Springs, FL, and to view his 15 acre organic chestnut forest. His Dunstans are a 2nd generation cross between the American and the blight resistant Chinese chestnuts, first released commercially in the 1960s by a physician in Alachua County, Florida.
The Dunstan Chestnut was an outgrowth of the collaborative work of a supremely devoted community of pomologists, The Northern Nut Growers Association. Two members, neither of whom lived in the North—James Carpenter of Salem in eastern Ohio—and breeder Dr. Robert G. Dunstan of Greensboro NC fostered this intriguing mixture of American Chestnut and Chinese Chestnut—Castanea dentata x mollissima. Carpenter found a seemingly disease resistant American Chestnut in Ohio and sent budwood to Dunstan, who pollinated the resulting trees with a very blight resistant strain of Chinese Chestnut maintained by the USDA. Dunstan took the best of the hybrid trees and backcrossed it with American and Chinese trees. The second generation back-crosses were sent to Northern Florida where a group of physicians and retired aerospace engineers began interbreeding the trees in groves near Gainesville. After the Dunstan proved its staying power and resistant to blight in North Florida, it was granted the first US plant patent given to an American bred variety.
The trees have the stature of the Asian rather than the American parent, but the nuts taste much like the American, though possessing the larger girth of the Asian. That said, the genetic diversity is such that trees vary greatly, some having the thinner, less shiny leaves of the American, others the gloss and thickness of the Asian. Some trees bear nuts profusely; others less so. Perhaps most important, they did well in a variety of eastern soils. They could self propagate and form sustainable edible landscapes.
Perhaps the best news about the Dunstan was that tasted less starchy than most Chinese strains of Chestnut. They also tend to be more shelf stable when cured than most European varieties. For this reason, the Dunstan nuts have appeared in grocery store bins during the holiday Season. Kearsey himself has sold to Whole Foods and other chains.
But there is a kind of stupidity to the chestnut market. Marketers only want the nuts after November 1, when the “chestnuts roasting on an open fire” associations begin to kick in. The nuts begin to fall in Florida during the 3rd week of September. Fresh nuts will spoil—when cold stored they can harden and dry out. Because we have forgotten how in parts of this country chestnut was a year round crop—with chestnut meal and flour, preserved chestnuts, pickled chestnuts and dried nuts pantry staples—the gatekeepers of the food system can’t accept the chestnut in its natural season of harvest. Joel’s solution was to roast and chip nut meats selling them as flavoring for beer. He interested local brewers in fashioning an autumnal alternative to the ubiquitous pumpkin beer. But what was the finest thing I tasted flavored from Florida Chestnuts, a chestnut-fed hog that was barbecued in SC in autumn of 2013.
Word filtered up from Florida that two wild pigs had been sequestered in Joel Kersey’s Dunstan grove, Glenn Roberts, president of the Foundation, sent a request to buy them. And so two pigs gorged on fallen nuts until they had grown sufficiently fat to warrant a truck trip southward. Glenn hauled two ornery fat pigs into South Carolina, and on November 14, 2013 they were handed over to 601 Deer and Hog Processing in Fort Motte, South Carolina for butchering. One of the pigs would be handed over to Chuck Ross and James Helms for barbecuing. It was a splendid event, held out in Eastover. Alas, the benefactor of the BBQ, Glenn Roberts was forced to be elsewhere and could not attend the feast that he had underwritten. It happened far too often in the years to come—circumstance in the field would require him to be somewhere else when a feast or event that his work had enabled took place. We who attended bless him in his absence, as we always did and do.
So what was it like to walk a North Florida chestnut grove? Peaceful. Yet disturbingly tempting when low branches are laden with fat burrs of nearly ripe nuts. It was a sunny day when I walked the widow grove—and sun is needed for the nuts to form, so spacing and limb length is managed to let light shine between the trees. Yet in the more mature organic grove the trees have grown together, necessity a canopy cutting project in the coming years.