Chestnuts

This week our focus is on the BROWN.

It is assumed that the nut is originally from Asia Minor, the Balkans and Caucasus, tracking the history of Western civilization for more than 100,000 years. Along with pistachio, chestnut was an important contribution to the caloric prehistoric man who also used in animal nutrition.

The Greeks and Romans put chestnuts in amphorae filled with honey. This kept the food and impregnated it with your taste. The Romans included the brown in their feasts. During the Middle Ages, the monasteries and abbeys, monks and nuns often used nuts in your recipes. By this time, the chestnut, was crushed, it has become one of Europe's leading flour.

With the Renaissance, the food takes on new sophistication, with new formulas and clothing. Surge marron glacé, from France to Spain and then, with the Napoleonic wars, arrives in Portugal.

The nut you eat is, in fact, a seed that comes inside a hedgehog (the fruit of the chestnut tree). But while it is a seed, such as nuts, has much less and more fat starch (a carbohydrate), which gives other possible uses in food. The nuts have the same about twice the proportion of starch from potatoes. They are also rich in vitamins C and B6 and a good source of potassium. Considered at present, almost like a "treat" of time, the nuts in time gone by, were a nutritional food supplement, replacing the bread in his absence, when the rigors of winter and scarcity settled. Boiled, baked or processed into flour, nuts have always been a very popular food, whose use dates back to prehistory.

in: http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castanha