Maigret meets Marple

Yesterday was a day when Maigret talked about the marronniers of Paris and Miss. Marple talked about her penchant for marrons glacés, with these last being something that BH had heard of before, although she was a bit vague on the details. Clearly time for an investigation, which, in the event, has taken a lot longer than one might have thought at the outset - and with hindsight I might have done better to start with wikipedia rather than with Littré and Larousse.

Littré explained that a marronnier was a variety of châtaignier in which the three small nuts to the case of the regular chestnut were reduced by some happy mutation to one big nut. And while Larousse mentions these nuts, it gives more space, and the accompanying pictures, to the horse chestnut, which the French, when they are being pedantic, call the Indian chestnut. I have not been able to find out why, with wikipedia saying that the horse chestnut started out from the Balkans and headed north, not east.

The sweet chestnut is more or less unrelated to the horse chestnut, but we are at least agreed that there are lots of these last lining Parisian streets, parks and suburbs. See reference 1.

I think the sweet chestnut groves which border one side of Virginia Water must be the three small nut variety; certainly we have never come across nuts worth eating there. And while BH remembers collecting proper sweet chestnuts in her childhood, I think my family stuck to hazel nuts, trashed by grey squirrels in our present garden. Maybe we should have gone in for sweet chestnuts - which are related to beech nuts and have been an important part of the diet in Europe and elsewhere, still are in some areas. So while the pigs of old ate beechnuts entire and raw, us humans eat chestnuts peeled and cooked. The pigs probably had more powerful teeth and digestions.

Coming back to Miss. Marple, my first thought was that marrons glacés were to chestnuts what sugared almonds were to almonds, but it seems that this is not the case, as marrons glacés involve both soaking in syrup and coating in syrup. See illustration above.

PS: over lunch it turned out that we had a (sealed) bag of chestnuts, peeled for our greater convenience, left over from Christmas. There are now plans to turn them into marrons glacés using the recipe in the book mentioned at reference 2. We are warned that this recipe, while looking simple enough, is quite hard to get right. And, chestnuts and stomachs willing, there is also a recipe for chocolate chestnuts.

Reference 1: http://www.thesanguineroot.com/?p=1691.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/truffes.html.