My Cold-Weather Roast Comes From a Tree

An occasional series in which staff members share a recipe that we turn to time and again:

Catch them in the right moment -- the right moment being this time of year -- and many people can recall happy times in their lives that involve chestnuts, whether or not they've ever actually eaten one. That's probably because six decades after Nat King Cole first recorded it, "The Christmas Song" remains one of the most popular holiday tunes: Listen to it a few times and you'll start to think that you, too, spend much of December roasting chestnuts on an open fire.

If you've never roasted chestnuts, you might try this year. The recipe, if you can call it that, is simple. And besides, it's never too late to start a tradition.

My memories of chestnuts take me back not to Christmas but to autumn, because that's when I tasted them for the first time. Four years ago I was in Italy visiting my best friend and her parents, and we spent a few days at her mother's childhood home in Friuli, in the northeastern corner of the country. One evening, while we were relaxing in the kitchen, my friend's father brought out a bag of chestnuts and, to my wonderment, began roasting them on the cast-iron surface of the wood-burning stove.

I had always put chestnuts in the same category as sleigh bells: things you can imagine but will never actually see. The campfirelike smell that slowly filled the room as the chestnuts got hotter; the beautiful, wrinkled golden balls that emerged as we peeled off their cracked brown shells and membranes; their unexpectedly sweet taste: It all seemed like something from a story, not a simple tradition that I could take home.

But I never forgot the castagnata, the chestnut-roasting. This year I roped some friends in Bethesda into having one of our own. We snatched up the first chestnuts of the season and even ordered a bottle of fragolino, the sparking dessert wine that my Italian friends serve as an accompaniment, through A. Litteri, the Italian grocery store at the Capital City Market. I wrote to the father in Italy to ask what else would go well with our chestnuts.

"People gathered chestnuts in hillside forests and ate them with nothing else," he responded. "Their fragrance while they cooked, the fact that they were sometimes roasted in the fireplace -- these things alone were reason enough to be happy."

And then:

"The addition of a glass of good wine was like touching your finger to heaven."

Suddenly, chestnuts had turned back into the stuff of a story.

My friends and I went ahead with our castagnata, and since then I've done a few more by myself. Nothing fancy: I'll roast six chestnuts one evening, eight the next, just enough to keep their smell in my apartment. I can't say that it's like touching heaven, but the story behind the tradition gets me halfway there. And that is enough.

Emily Langer is the Outlook section's editorial aide.