It reminds you of something, those chestnuts pulled from the fire... but what, apart from winter, frozen hands, the delicious taste of hot chestnuts burning your fingers?
Yes, precisely, there are those who burn their fingers to seize them, and those who prefer to concentrate on the sole pleasure of tasting, leaving them to be seized by others, as in La Fontaine's fable, entitled THE
Singe et le Chat, where the Raton cat removes the chestnuts from the fire as they are roasted, in favor of Bertrand the monkey who feasts on them.
The phrase already existed in the form “pull the chestnuts out of the fire with the cat’s paw” before La Fontaine, who probably ensured its popularization and survival.
But the paw of the cat which had already disappeared from the phrase in the past seems, recently, to have been definitively removed from the action, since it would seem that the expression "to pull the chestnuts from the fire" is used today without assuming the help of a third person, suggesting that one has taken advantage of a very delicate situation, without looking too closely at the means that one had to employ to achieve this.