Chestnuts

Last week we walked through the park called “Parson’s Pleasure” on our way into Oxford town. It’s one of the Gertz kids’ favorite places to play, a grassy spot bordered by part of the river and shaded by lots of trees. This time of year, Lisa told us, Naomi, Josiah and Ethan love gathering and playing with the “conkers” that had fallen from the trees. They were trying to gather more than their friend, who allegedly had over 100.

When we got to the park and the kids gleefully set about their search and gather operation, I said, “Hey, these are chestnuts. There sure are a lot of them. I’ve always wanted to try eating them.” The kids did not want to relinquish any of their precious store, so I gathered some conkers of my own. When we got home, I looked online to find out how they’re prepared for eating. Actually, it’s not hard: you cut an X into the hard skin, bake them for a short time, and pop the edible part out of the skin. (See How to Prepare and Eat Chestnuts).

We kept waiting for a rainy day when we would need some indoor diversion, but we still haven’t had a rainy day in our two weeks in Oxford. So finally, on Tuesday, Barb and Lisa went ahead and followed the instructions to roast the chestnuts. They were ready after dinner, maybe a little too ready since it was smelling like smoke, and Barb started getting them out of their tough skin. It was harder then she expected, as the insides seemed to stick rather than pop out. I tasted a pinch of the inside, which looked and felt like a dry potato, and it did taste something like a tuber, certainly nothing very interesting. A little bitter. In fact, a few seconds later, rather bitter. Actually, as the taste lingered, quite unpleasantly bitter! Yuck! Steve tasted one also, with the same reaction.

Chestnuts, the tasty kind

Back to Google: “bitter chestnuts.” Had I misread the instructions, missed a step? I soon saw links to “horse chestnuts,” saying that they were similar to chestnuts, but bitter. They are inedible and actually poisonous. Oh yes, and they are popular in Britain for the children’s game conkers!

Meanwhile, Barb had just kept eating the horse chestnuts. She says, “Everyone was just saying they were yucky, but I thought, ‘That doesn’t prove anything….’” By the time she was convinced that it was not a good idea, she thought she might have eaten about four. Steve, being rather sensitive to health issues, was also worried about the amount he had eaten, too.

OK, Google again for more details about horse chestnut toxicity. It can’t be all that bad, right? Yes and no. Apparently it is not a common problem, since we didn’t find a lot of warnings or anything about treating poisoning. The information was mostly that the seeds are indeed toxic, but “rarely result in death in humans.” Rather, “symptoms associated with horse chestnut poisoning may include vomiting, diarrhea, headache, confusion, weakness, muscle twitching, poor coordination, coma, or paralysis.”

I wasn’t concerned at all about the little taste Steve and I had taken, but what about Barb, if she had actually eaten four of the things? We called the medical hotline (a nice feature of the British National Health Service) where a nurse took down all the information including whether Barb was conscious and breathing, then said she would have to research the issue and get back to us within an hour. Final answer, yes, horse chestnuts are toxic, but you’d have to eat a lot of them to get really sick.

Horse chestnuts

So, that was our evening’s adventure, funny in retrospect. Actually, how had I done such a thing? The glaring mistake was that I had unthinkingly assumed that these things were in fact chestnuts, based on a vague memory and on the fact that they looked like the chestnuts the web pages showed. I’d never even eaten one before! Rather alarming actually, looking back, but no one was hurt and we probably learned our lesson well.