Portland ? Chestnut grower Sandy Bole recalls the Asian woman who comes to her 25-acre orchard outside this Pacific Northwest city to buy 40 pounds of the mahogany-colored fruit.

“She gives them to her kids as a snack when they come home from school,” explains Bole.

For most home cooks, chestnuts are a holiday food, not an everyday snack food. In season at this time of year, they’re often cooked in stuffing or, as the Christmas song goes, set “roasting on an open fire.”

These wintry days, walk down the streets of Paris, Rome and New York and you’ll smell the familiar aroma of chestnuts roasting from vendors’ street carts.

The versatile, meaty, sweet nuggets have long been a staple in Asian and European cuisine, but only recently has their presence surged on the American food scene.

While purists favor the taste of a fresh chestnut, they admit it takes work to peel them. But, at my extended family’s holiday gatherings, roasting and shelling nuts were always a part of the holiday ritual.

Toward the middle of the meal, someone would start the chestnuts roasting in the oven. My mother recalls how my uncle would visit the oven periodically to sprinkle red wine on the roasting nuts.

Sitting around the table, we would leisurely talk, peel and eat chestnuts with the fruit course, the perfect finale to our holiday feast. A glass of the Italian liqueur anisette, the Italian eau de vie grappa, or sweet red wine was always nearby — many Italians dunk the chestnut in red wine before eating it.

Roasting is only one of many ways to use this versatile fruit. Though it resembles and is often classified as a nut, chestnuts are a fruit and, as such, need to be refrigerated and kept moist, according to Sandra L. Anagnostakis, an agricultural scientist with the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station in New Haven.

Because of its full-bodied and almost starchy mouth-feel and uses that are similar to grains, growers call the chestnut “a grain on a tree.”

Maya H. Klein, a Portland cooking teacher of Japanese descent, says chestnuts were served in her family as a savory accompaniment to rice or as a side dish. She cooks a traditional side dish in a way that’s typical for other Japanese vegetables: The chestnuts are boiled and then glazed with a sauce that includes sake, ginger, salt, sugar and soy sauce.

Chestnuts, historically, have played an important role in cultures around the world. The Greek philosopher Theophrastus wrote about chestnut trees “covering the slopes of Olympus.” The Chinese and Japanese were breeding chestnut orchard trees thousands of years ago.

In northern Italy, chestnuts have been a staple food for hundreds of years and whole villages lived on them during the World Wars.

American Indians had many uses for the fruit. “Chestnuts were a valuable food resource for most Woodland peoples,” writes Dale Carson in “New Native American Cooking.”

“The nuts were ground into flours for bread and the meats roasted and eaten plain, boiled with milk and mashed like potatoes, and folded into soups and stews for flavor and as a thickening agent.”

Chestnuts, like apples, have subtle taste differences, depending on the variety.

What about the nutritional side of chestnuts?

“They definitely are on the healthy end of holiday foods because they have the nutrition, not much fat, and a lot of flavor,” says Sue Moores, spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Assn.

Chestnuts have no cholesterol and range from 100 to 250 calories per 3-ounce serving, depending on the variety and method of cooking. Boiled and steamed are lowest in calories.