A Mast Year

Until someone mentioned it on the radio recently, I had never come across the expression "a mast year" before. I doubt many people had. I knew the word "mast", but only in the context of "beech mast", which I had understood to mean the crap littered on the ground beneath beech trees, which is usually just a lot of of empty seed cases plus a few of the nuts, which are tiny, undernourished-looking things and incredibly bitter, although if you were desperate they could probably be cooked up into something marginally edible. Squirrels and birds seem to like them, though, and they're welcome.

But a mast year is apparently one in which the yield of all wild fruits and nuts is unusually abundant, and this has certainly been the case in Britain. In fact, I don't remember ever seeing anything quite like it before. Every tree and bush is exploding with whatever berries, seeds, or nuts it would normally put forth in autumn in far more modest quantities. Oak trees in particular are carpeting our pavements and roadsides with drifts of acorns that get ground into a mix of shell fragments and acorn flour as they are trodden underfoot and crushed by parking cars. Inexplicably, we haven't allowed pigs to roam free in our streets for several hundred years – and what a good solution to speeding traffic that could be – so, apart from the ones that get carted off by squirrels, they go uneaten.

We were walking in Spearywell Wood (near Mottisfont, near Romsey, near Southampton...), crunching our way through the carpet of acorns, when we came to a large sweet chestnut tree (Castanea sativa [1]) beside the path. The ground beneath it was strewn with its seed cases, densely covered in long needle-sharp spines, but all bursting open to reveal a cluster of fat and glossy-brown chestnuts. Now, it bears repeating that the nuts of the sweet chestnut – edible and delicious – are a very different proposition to those of the horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum) whose similar looking nuts, a.k.a. conkers in Britain, are toxic. These, too, are lying around everywhere, something that in my childhood would have been inconceivable: conkers were gathered up as soon as they began to fall by children, in order to play the game of the same name, something now relegated to folklore by electronic devices and health and safety concerns, along with the likes of chain-he in the school playground [2], hopscotch, skipping-rope games, and all the other entertainments and pastimes of my youth.

Why, kids under 18 today can't even buy fireworks, let alone pop a few bangers inside a neighbour's dustbin to watch the lid blow off, as bangers themselves (firecrackers) are now illegal in the UK, and setting off any fireworks in the street is against the law. As that rascal Raoul Vaneigem almost said, "Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not blow a few fingers off has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom".

Anyway, stumbling across this natural bounty brought out our hunter-gatherer instincts. I always keep a plastic carrier-bag folded away within my canvas shoulder-bag – you never know when one might come in handy – so we were able to scoop up a large quantity of them. We could easily have filled the bag, but this would have been impractically heavy and, besides, you can only eat so many chestnuts. As we gathered them from underneath the tree, more were falling around us with a solid thud. Luckily we didn't get hit, which would have been like being struck with a mace by some invisible fairy knight, or perhaps by a freefalling hedgehog whose parachute had failed to open.

Handling chestnuts reminds me that when I was a child in Stevenage we always used to spend Boxing Day (December 26th) at the house of my godparents, "auntie" Win and "uncle" Les, who lived nearby and were classic new-towners: East Enders who had left war-ravaged London for a better life in north Hertfordshire. We were close – they had lived in the flat below the one I was born in – but it's hard to exaggerate the utter tedium back then of being on your Sunday-best behaviour – seen but not heard – on days when everything was shut and the weather was too bad to play outside. Worse, if there were no children around close to your own age – Win and Les's daughter was the same age as my sister, eight years older than me – you had to sit quietly somewhere entertaining yourself as best you could, exiled from your new toys back at home. However, there was always a good supply of nuts on hand at their house, so I'd while away the hours with a nutcracker, investigating and improving my technique opening hazel nuts, brazil nuts, almonds, walnuts, and – something we never had at home – sweet chestnuts.

In those years following the end of post-war rationing pretty much everything was seasonal: even oranges only appeared in the shops in winter. Similarly, chestnuts were imported from France and Italy for a brief period around Christmas, and were something of a luxury. These imported chestnuts were sweet, even uncooked, and it was an interesting challenge to open the flexible shell and then remove the unpleasant inner husk without breaking the tasty kernel into tiny pieces. Perhaps not as engaging as Super Mario on a Game Boy but, as we old Boxing Day survivors always like to say, you made your own entertainment in those days. The sweet chewiness of the raw chestnut was the reward for much squeezing, peeling, and flaking away. A slight stomach ache from too much tannin was the price you paid.

So the first thing I did with our haul from Spearywell Wood was to cut one nut in half, extract a small piece, and taste it. To my amazement it was utterly revolting; so tongue-shrivellingly bitter I had to spit it out and rinse my mouth with water. This was true durian territory. Which was a bit of an unexpected blow, obviously. But a little web-surfing convinced me it would still be worth roasting them, so I took a few and did as instructed: I cut an incised cross into the rounded side, soaked them in water for an hour or two, then gave them 20-30 minutes in the oven. They turned out fine: all bitterness had gone, and they were perfectly edible.

Talking of seasonal vegetables and chestnuts, here's a recipe you might like to try which transforms brussels sprouts from a chore – eat your greens or there's no pudding for you! – into something that even those who claim to hate the things might enjoy.

You will need:

Brussels (about six per person)
Pack of pre-cooked whole chestnuts, available all year round (if you don't have any I've also used unsalted cashews, walnuts, or almonds)
Lardons (pancetta or bacon)
Butter or margarine
Olive oil
Salt and pepper

Trim the outer leaves from the brussels, so that you have a tight, fresh-looking core. With a sharp knife cut each in half lengthways, then cut each half again lengthways: you should have something resembling the segments of an orange. I actually tend to get fancy with the knifework and cut each half into three segments. The less they look like brussels the better.

Take the chestnuts – about half the number of brussels – and either slice them or dice them into small pieces. If using other nuts you'll need quite a few more, obviously, and these are best roughly chopped. Attempting to slice cashews, in particular, is a quick route to despair, as bits will ping all over the kitchen.

Heat some olive oil in a frying pan, and melt in some butter or marge.

Add some lardons to the pan – not too many, just enough to flavour the mix – and fry until they start to colour up, then add the brussels and the nuts, plus salt and pepper "to taste", as the recipe books always say. Stir fry the whole lot over a moderate heat until cooked: the brussels will have started to brown.

If the end result is a bit too oily, tip them out onto a double sheet of kitchen towel on a plate before serving. They go well with any roast, whether a Christmas goose or a joint of meat at the weekend, or even just a couple of sausages and a baked potato. Hmm, suddenly I'm feeling very hungry.

The phases of the sprout...

1. Readers of a certain inclination may be struck by the rather familiar second (species) part of that binomial scientific name. In fact, "sativa" is quite common (rice, for example, is Oryza sativa): it simply means "cultivated", an adjective derived from "sat-", being the passive perfect participle stem of the verb serō, “I sow or plant”. But you knew that.

2. An accident-prone variant of the game we knew as "he" or "it", but more widely known as "tag". I doubt very much that schoolchildren are allowed to play it at all, now, much less parade around the playground chanting "Olly, olly in, fer chainy!" (translation: I say, fellows, who wants to play chain-he?"). Ip dip, sky blue, who's It? Not you!