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 co