From nuts to soups

A curious gust of chestnut soups has settled in this season, without apparent rhyme or, well, who needs a reason, overstaying the normal autumn run.

No shared motive emerges. And sometimes stuff just happens - like the sudden uptick in local, house-made hot dogs and the remakes of, yes, scrapple (with crab, with just vegetables, and with foie gras, or partly foie gras.)

At Meme, the corner spot at 22d and Spruce Streets, chef David Katz made a batch of his abidingly simple puree (just chestnuts, onion, chicken stock, and a dab of crème fraîche) for a guest chef's dinner one night.

He had so many chestnuts left over, he offered it for four more evenings. Now it's showing up as something of a regular special.

At Basque-themed Tinto, part of the Garces compound (now including Village Whiskey) at 20th and Sansom Streets, it's soap de castaño and in its third year. It's likely to stay on the menu until March, says chef David Conn, a warm, rich bowl, spiked with a touch of brandy and finished with a hit of honey and truffle - beloved by regulars.

(In Navarra, on the flank of Spain's northern Basque region, a very different end-of-meal version dates to ancient times: Roasted chestnuts are simmered in milk with a cinnamon stick and sugar, then baked under a crust of sliced bread for a dessert soup.)

A Portuguese contender waded in recently - the cenoura e castanhas at Koo-Zee-Doo, the charming, 42-seat dining room on Second Street near Spring Garden Avenue. In this case, it's a velvety puree of carrots and roasted chestnuts. (Chef David Gilberg originally made the soup, inspired by his wife Carla's Portuguese mother, with Hubbard squash and a mild, floury sausage called farinheira. The switch to carrot and chestnut, with submerged grapes instead of meat, was aimed at adding another vegan dish to the lineup.

And on a cold night, before a supper of roasted vegetables and slivered duck over baked rice, it starts you off nice and gently.

A fresh chestnut, of course, is a thing of its own - a nut, but tenderer and sweeter, with a bit of the lima bean's starchiness about it. The expression "a hard nut" was not meant to describe the chestnut.

So it is not so surprising, then, that it gravitates toward the softer side - to combination with earthy mushrooms, to dressings with cherries and to turkey stuffings, to pasta flour (and cream sauces for pasta at Le Castagne, at 20th and Chestnut Streets, for instance), and pastry filling for cream puffs and gelato, and . . . which brings us right back to soup.

The grand American chestnut forests succumbed to blight nearly a century ago, leaving us with tiny revival groves on the order of the 30-acre Delmarvelous spread in Townsend, Del. (Its lovely hybrid chestnuts are sold out for this season. But you can check them out for fall at www.delmarvelouschestnuts.com).

That leaves chestnut lovers reliant to a large extent on the fresh crops from France and from Italy, where not many years ago Jeff Michaud, now the chef at handsome Osteria on North Broad Street, was learning the Italian culinary ropes and courting the local beauty, Claudia, who would later become his wife.

As he tells the story - and it requires little prompting - there was a chestnut forest behind Claudia's home in Bergamo, in the northern Italian region of Lombardy. The chestnuts were so prolific and irresistible that wild boar came to forage, adding new meaning to farm to table. (Claudia's brother occasionally shot one from his bedroom window for dinner.)

It came to pass that wild boar was offered at Osteria, spit-roasted over the wood fire and served with chestnut polenta and chestnut sauce, and after one particular dinner party the leg meat was transformed into a soup.

Exactly why that gave Michaud the idea for his astonishingly flavorful capon-chestnut soup is not clear. But that's what he told me after I polished off a bowl so bright and brothy and sweet with green cabbage that I asked for the story of its pedigree.

So that's its story, juicy capons brined for three days, spit-roasted, their bones saved for the chicken stock; some sweet cabbage and leeks; and at the end, chestnuts roasted on an open fire.

You need a reason for that?

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