Marron glacé is a confection originating in France[1][2] or Italy[3] that consists of a chestnut candied in sugar syrup and glazed.

Candied chestnuts appeared in chestnut-growing areas in Europe shortly after the crusaders returned from the Middle East with sugar.

[3] In 1667, François Pierre La Varenne, ten years' chef de cuisine to Nicolas Chalon du Blé, Marquis of Uxelles (near Lyon and a chestnut-producing area), and foremost figure of the nouvelle cuisine movement of the time, published his best-selling book Le parfaict confiturier.

Nevertheless, that book was not mentioned (nor indeed any other) when the recipe, applied to cocoa beans, was in 1694 passed on to Jean-Baptiste Labat, a French missionary in Martinique.

In 1882, in Privas, Ardèche, he and a local confectioner set up the first factory with the technology to produce marron glacé industrially (though many of the nearly twenty steps necessary from harvest to finished product are still performed manually).

[14] Chestnuts are covered with a membrane, known as a pellicle or episperm, which closely adheres to the fruit's flesh and must be removed because of its astringency.

[12] Some chestnuts have two cotyledons usually separated with deep grooves penetrating nearly all the way through the fruit; this makes them too fragile for the necessary manipulations during the cooking process.

In Italy, the term marrone denotes a specific high-quality cultivar of Castanea sativa bearing oblong fruits with a shiny, reddish epicarp and often exhibiting a small rectangular hilar scar.