Horse Chestnuts

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Not just a nut

The horse chestnut’s names, both common and botanical, allude to its resemblance to the sweet chestnut, although the two are not even remotely related. The modifiers “horse” and “ippo” trace back to the nut’s traditional use by the early Turks as a cough remedy for winded horses. American species go by the nickname Buckeye, because the gray scar at the base of each shiny round kernel reminded settlers of the eye of a deer. Finally, the genus name Aesculus comes from the Latin “esca” meaning food, oddly enough, since the horse chestnut is quite poisonous, unless you are a squirrel or a deer. Honeybees won’t even touch the flowers. One of the tree’s not-too-distant cousins is Paullinia pinnata, which is among the deadly ingredients used by South American natives in their famous curare poison arrows.

In humans, eating the raw nuts causes a malady that the Food and Drug Administration refers to as “horse chestnut poisoning.” The offending agent is a glucoside called esculin that produces altogether unpleasant symptoms including nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and headache, with extreme cases leading to circulatory and respiratory failure, and even death. Fortunately, compounds called tannins in the nuts make them unbearably bitter, so you never hear of anyone feasting to death on raw horse chestnuts.

Native Americans made ingenious use of the toxic nuts for fishing. They sprinkled ground kernels into pools of water, stunning the fish with the toxins that entered directly into the bloodstream through their gills and caused the fish to float to the water’s surface for easy harvest. The offending chemical was strong enough to stun the fish but had no ill affects on the Natives (in small enough dosage) as they consumed the fish. They also discovered a laborious process of roasting and repeated soakings in water that leached out the toxins and bitter tannins, rendering the nuts edible. European farmers employed a similar technique, boiling the nuts in potash. But they deemed the finished product suitable only as fodder for livestock and would not deign to eat it themselves.

Pockets full of uses

Though the horse chestnut never earned renown as a food, it has established itself as a multipurpose nut. High in compounds called saponins, which dissolve in water to create a rich lather and which give soaps and shampoos their characteristic suds, horse chestnuts were prized by French and Swiss housewives for washing woolens. Nineteenth-century physicians in Europe and America prescribed the powdered nuts as therapeutic snuff to clear blocked sinuses—a forceful whiff caused violent sneezing. Victorian gentlefolk took a decoction of the nuts to soothe rheumatism and neuralgia. They applied horse chestnut poultices to skin ulcers and bruises and used a salve prepared with lard as a soothing balm for varicose veins and hemorrhoids. Peasants touted a tea made from the bark of the horse chestnut tree as an effective treatment for malaria, though there is no record that it actually worked.

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