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French Chestnuts with Coffee Sauce
Peel three dozen chestnuts, boil them in their skins (not their shells) for five minutes in salted boiling water; peel off their skins, put them in a saucepan on the fire, with enough water to cover them, and two ounces of sugar; boil them until quite soft, without breaking. Put into another saucepan over the fire four yolks of egg, three ounces of sugar, a teacupful of black coffee, and half a glass of cream. Stir until it begins to boil, then strain it. Allow it to become cold, pour it over the chestnuts, and serve.
A simple two-part dessert: chestnuts poached in light syrup, cooled under a coffee custard. The custard is the only place it can go wrong.
- The hinge: do not let the custard boil"Stir until it begins to boil" is Victorian shorthand for cooking a yolk sauce to the thickening point. Yolks set around 175-180F, and the sauce curdles a little above that; pull it off the heat as soon as it coats the spoon and strain immediately into a cold bowl.
- Two peelings, not oneThe instruction to "peel three dozen chestnuts, boil them in their skins (not their shells)" means shell them first, then blanch to loosen the bitter inner pellicle. Score each shell with an X before shelling; the pellicle comes away far more easily while the nuts are still hot.
- Quantity of chestnutsThree dozen chestnuts is roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb in the shell, giving about 3 cups peeled. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts can stand in, in which case skip the blanching and simmer them briefly in the sugar water only to warm and sweeten.
- Ounces of sugarSugar is given by weight: 2 oz is about 1/4 cup for the chestnuts, 3 oz about 6 tablespoons for the custard. Weighing is more reliable than converting.
- Teacupful and half a glassA teacupful in books of this period is variously reckoned at anywhere from 4 to 8 fl oz, so read it as somewhere between 1/2 and 1 cup of strong black coffee. "Half a glass of cream" is genuinely vague; period tables often put a glass at 2 fl oz, which would make this only an ounce or so, so start small and add more if the sauce is too stiff when cold.
- Keeping the nuts whole"Until quite soft, without breaking" means the barest simmer; a rolling boil will knock the nuts apart. Twenty to thirty minutes is usual, depending on freshness.
- ServingThe sauce is poured over cold and the dish served cold, not baked. It serves four to six in small glasses or shallow dishes, and both parts keep a day in the refrigerator, assembled at the last moment.
Chestnuts were a staple sweet in French cookery long before they were a luxury: marrons glacés, purées and compotes appear throughout nineteenth-century French repertoires, and English and American compilers borrowed them freely under the label "French." The coffee is worth noting too: a crème anglaise infused with black coffee was an easy, modish way to dress a familiar nut. Its placement in a chapter headed "Croquettes, Etc" says a good deal about how such books were assembled.