J. C. MOORE, Alabama Polytechnic Institute, Auburn, Ala.
Professor Moore: Mr. President, members of the Association: I have a few packages here that I just wanted to pass around after we get through with a short discourse on processed chestnuts. It might be somewhat of an inspiration to look while I talk a few minutes about it.
These nuts, of course, have been put up from the 1947 crop, but I have nuts put up in 1945 that are still in fair shape. The quality on the 1945 product is not too good. The quality on the 1947 product is excellent when the nut is hot. For instance, a toasted chestnut, I think, has a quality that no other nut has. When the nut sits in a bag sealed for several weeks and gets cold it still is good, but it doesn't have quite the crispness that it has when it is really fresh and hot.
We were very much disappointed with Chinese chestnuts when they first began to bear at Auburn. We got some plants from Mr. Gravatt and the Bureau of Plant Industry in Beltsville in 1938. They were planted; some of them started bearing in 1941. The nuts were large in size; the trees seemed to be perfectly healthy. The early bearing habit gave us a great deal of encouragement. Then we sampled these nuts, and the quality was not good. While the nuts were green and in storage the nuts decomposed in just a few days' time.
The first nuts that we harvested in 1941 were picked, placed in paper bags, set in the office, and we forgot about them, because they were not good when we put them in the bags, and we just put them back for our record purposes. A few days afterwards they were moldy and ruined. In 1942 we had a little better crop, but again the nuts rotted. In 1943 we had a still larger crop, and the nuts rotted again. We did not know how to take care of those nuts at the time.
In 1944 Mr. L. S. Holden was with the Soil Conservation Service. He was transferred to Auburn at the time I was transferred down into Haiti to do some work on rubber production, and he took my place at Auburn on the hillculture project. In the fall of 1944 Mr. Holden had an idea that he could can those chestnuts and preserve them. So he took the nuts, cracked the hull off of the nut, ground it with a little food chopper, and placed the nuts in cans, pints and quarts, put them in a pressure cooker at 15 pounds pressure and cooked them for 15 minutes.
During the fall of 1944, or after the crop was produced, Mr. Holden left Auburn, and he told me when he left that he had sent some of the samples to different parts of the United States and had gotten favorable replies from the samples that he had sent out. That gave me a renewed courage, and along with that in 1945 we sold quite a few raw nuts on the market at Auburn. Those nuts sold just like hot cakes for 40 cents a pound. There were quite a few comments came back to us about those nuts. They were the most beautiful nuts the people had ever seen, and several different ones made comments that the nuts toasted had excellent quality and the nuts boiled had excellent quality, and raw nuts after they were cured had an excellent quality.
Those few different peoples comment on the material and Mr. Holden's work that he had done on canning gave me an idea that maybe he had something, and I have worked since that time trying to perfect a product that would be edible from the hand from a cellophane-bag standpoint. At the present time we have a plan worked out whereby we can produce large quantities of Chinese chestnuts in Alabama.
The thing that is going to confront us in the near future is the marketing possibility. We have to handle Chinese chestnuts rapidly if we put them on the market raw. This processed method that we have has been worked out to perfection, we think, for cold storage purposes.
Now, you can put Chinese chestnuts raw in cellophane bags and seal them with a hot iron. These bags are not sealed. It is a non-sealable cellophane. I didn't get hold of the type of cellophane that you can seal. They are unsealed. They have been in this package about a week, and the nuts are in good shape. On cold storage I have held those nuts for 40 days. Last year was the first time that I tried them in sealed cellophane, but sealed in cellophane bags in cold storage last year they remained perfectly good for 40 days. At that time the cold storage plant went bad, and, of course, the nuts molded.