ITS FIVE DAYS BEFORE Christmas Its five days before ...
Chestnuts.
I planted myself beside one pushcart to observe a response that soon proved involuntary. Again and again, people walking past would slow down, glance at the small basket of nuts on the vendor's cart, smell the sweet, husky smoke and murmur, "Chestnuts." The word came out of each person's mouth like a reflex. "Chestnuts." "Chestnuts." "Chestnuts."
The second most common reaction was a spontaneous break into Mel Torme and Robert Wells' "The Christmas Song," best known for its lyric "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire?" The tune was written in 1945, five years before America's chestnut tree population was officially wiped out by blight, a lethal Asian fungus that first appeared in 1904 in New York City. By 1940, three and a half billion American chestnuts had been killed.
Generations later, we sing about a memory that belongs to someone else. There has been meager success in genetically engineering a tree to withstand the blight?some were even planted in Central Park a few years ago?but few living people know the taste of that original American chestnut. According to New York food historian Anne Mendelson, those who have actually eaten the American chestnut of the last century say they were sweeter and more richly flavored than their European counterparts.
In midtown, at $3 per tiny bag, chestnuts are still a cash crop. Some of the guys who might sell you a soft pretzel in the autumn or hot dog in the spring wisely add chestnuts to their menus between Thanksgiving and the New Year. Even though the nuts are Italian, they're still as rustic as can be, arriving in 55-pound burlap sacks with the morning's delivery of provisions. It's not uncommon to see a vendor hunkered down on the sidewalk, slitting shells with an exacto knife.
Emish Emish, an Egyptian vendor in his late 20s, sports a five o'clock shadow and black-and-white striped toque. He taps the cart like it's a percussive instrument, following potential customers with a hungry gaze. The noise made by Emish and his neighbors on opposing corners rivals the urgency of honking horns or the steel drum-playing buskers. Their rhythmic slamming of heating box hatches is as much a sales pitch as it is a war cry.
"We wait whole year for Christmas! Whole year for five Saturday!" Shouts Emish. "I make all of my money in these days!"
With a slatted spoon he aggressively churns the nuts, scraping the bottom of the heated drum. The interest of a middle-aged man transforms Emish's scowl. Like the artist singing for his supper, Emish smiles clownishly and cranks out an improvised ditty, "Yes, chestnuts, chestnuts, chestnuts!"
[gabi@nypress.com](mailto:gabi@nypress.com)