“Why would you say a crazy thing like that to me?” My host flashed his lovely sweet smile.

   “I’m sorry!” I apologized. “Nat King Cole –“

   “I have no idea who that is.”

   “Oh. Right.” My mistake. How could I expect him to know Nat King Cole??    

He put down his cigarette and picked up the wine bottle, still smiling. “What an insane thing to say.”

I smiled back. Truce! “I just thought –“

   “Well don’t.” He poured our wine. “I made that dish just for you!”

   “Yes, it’s very good.” I got back to work with my steak knife, and finally resorted to my fingernails. With my ham-handed cutlery skills, dinner might as well have been a plate of bite-sized Rubik’s cubes.

   “Look at you. Acting like a child.” He couldn’t help laughing.

I laughed at myself too. Laughter seemed like a good sign for a first dinner date. Right?

My host was not to blame, that when anyone watched and pointed out my dining manners, I always wanted to shrink under the table. Even now, restaurants don’t feel like a happy place. For companionable eating I just want to buy my own hand-held food at a counter. Then we can find a quiet place to listen and talk and stroll side by side, and watch seagulls or squirrels instead of one another.

He filled my wine glass. “So you don’t like my cooking. Here I really looked forward to your visit tonight. I wanted it to be a nice evening. To make you feel welcome.”

   “Yes yes, I appreciate that.” I wrestled a bite and started chewing.

   “So I served your own food from YOUR tradition, not mine. But that comment you made to me just now? Don’t tell that to anyone. Everybody in the world will think you’re nuts.”

I crunched and chewed some more, and managed to swallow. Everybody in the world? Well, he knew better than I did. He’d seen a lot of that world, speaking five languages including mine, and I spoke not a word of his. He’d sampled fine food and wine all over the planet. And in most cultures, including his, refusing to eat a home-prepared meal was a hurtful insult.

He looked hurt now, but tried to laugh it off. “Look, never mind. Let’s forget the whole thing. What you don’t finish tonight, you can finish next time you come over.”

   “Oh, good,” I agreed. He was inviting me back for another date. “That will be very nice, thank you.” Next time I was going to figure this out and do a better job.

He put after-dinner mints on the table, took my plate to the kitchen, and drove me home.

Here is what I didn’t get to tell him. Instead I’ll say it here to you.

Nat King Cole sang “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire.” His song was on the radio and in shops and on record players all over the neighborhood between Thanksgiving and Christmas when I was small. All of us knew it (well, we knew the first 12 words). The song was always right where it belonged, as the winter backdrop for festivities to share and remember.

We even heard the song right on the streets in The City, when Dad took the whole carful of us for the big holiday trip each year. There we could walk through FAO Schwarz and look at plush stuffed animals, a whole Noah’s Ark, lifesize and lifelike enough to breathe. We could go to the Museum of Natural History to stare up at the great blue whale soaring along under the roof. We could go to Hayden Planetarium and hear a talk and watch a little green arrow trace out animal pictures out of twinkling lights on the ceiling, and tell us all about the Star of Bethlehem. We could go to the Christmas floor show at Radio City Music Hall. We could peek in at the German decorations and violinists at Lüchow’s. We could look in at the jewelry window at Tiffany’s. We could see skaters at Lincoln Center. We could see Central Park, and the carriage horses with bells on, and they let me reach up and pet their noses.

The weather was cold for those hours of walking on short solstice days, all wind tunnel around buildings so tall they cut out the sun. We could get warm standing on the street grates when the subway went rushing underfoot. We could stand near the warm pushcarts in the street too, with their hot charcoal fires baking up great big soft pretzels with kosher salt, and honey-roasted peanuts, and buttery popcorn tumbling inside a window.

But the best warmth was the little bags of chestnuts. Dad was a hero for being our tour guide and for buying a bag for us before the car ride home. In the bag there was heat and smoke and scorched shells to warm our hands. The shells cracked right off along with the fuzzy inside skin. The wrinkly pale little nut brain inside had a creamy soft mouth feel, and a heavenly taste between the best cashews and the best baked sweet potato ever.

At home for the couple of weeks when chestnuts were in the market, it was something special when Mom & Dad brought home a bagful for the kitchen. They looked pretty on the table as a centerpiece, in a pewter bowl with gourds and autumn leaves and chrysanthemum flowers.

A raw chestnut has a hard tough leather hull. If you hack and wrestle off the hull and try to eat a raw one it’s just fuzzy and astringent and bitter skin, and crunchy starch. If you put them in the oven as is, the steam will burst the kernels. Then you’ll just get an oven with shell bits and fluff.

So Mom taught me how to cut a deep cross in the dome-shaped side. That was my girl homemaker job. I loved blessing the chestnuts by carving the sign of the cross in every one. Then when they came hot from the gas stove we had a platter of chewy sugary comfort. We ate our chestnuts with buttered popcorn and hot apple cider and homemade Toll House cookies and Mom’s blended cream & egg & sugar & vanilla & nutmeg nog, and all of us piled in on the sofa watching Nat King Cole.

Then I went off to college, and had an invitation to a real dinner date, and got all dressed up, and found myself facing off with a whole plate of chestnuts served raw. I just figured this was the cosmopolitan sophisticated way to eat them, like sushi-grade raw tuna instead of tuna from a can. Maybe it hurt his feelings and his pride when I apologized for my table manners by confessing that I was only familiar with chestnuts in roasted form. Now, what if I were clever and brave? What if I said “Say, let’s try something fun. I can roast some of these for you right now, and we can have a taste test, and you can see what you think.” But instead, during that short relationship, every time I came to visit, that same plateful was served with no sign of the cross in any of them. I chipped away at several more nuts each time.

In my new town the mature chestnut trees were killed off long ago by The Great Blight. But in older neighborhoods and back alleys maybe there are ancient stumps underground, because you still find little saplings springing up to make a brave fresh start for a short doomed life. Their green burrs are falling on the ground this very week. Sometimes the burrs are crushed open by cars, and then in gingerly fashion (those spines are sharp) I ease them apart to get the nuts inside. So far the nuts are just empty shells. But I always stop and admire them anyway as an American treasure, and think about winters long ago, back when gaslight was a noun and a power that stayed in the oven making itself useful, when Mom & Dad were alive and just wanted the family to be happy.

That night my host put out his cigarette and poured himself a second glass, still laughing. “You’re positively mad. Chestnuts roasted? Who does that? Nobody.” He headed down the hall to get our coats and his car keys.

I helped myself to a couple of dinner mints, eased open his door, poured my wine out under some shrubs, and to cheer up hummed to myself a catchy little holiday song from years ago.

That was a sleepless night, wondering how another date with another suitor went off the rails. Maybe I got it all wrong about Nat King Cole after all? Maybe that song was a deeper allegory about something else entirely that went right over my head? Only years later, typing these words, did a dawning realization make me smile: The Host didn’t have to be attend to my words, not when a whole battalion could have backed me up and set him straight: the no-nonsense pushcart vendors who rule the holiday streets of a city that does not mistake its recipes or mince its words.