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Roast Chestnuts
Peel the raw chestnuts and scald them, in order to remove the inner skin; put them in a frying pan with a little butter and toss them about a few minutes; add a little salt and the least sprinkle of cayenne. Serve them after the cheese.
Peanuts may be roasted in the same way.
A short savoury for the end of dinner, and one of the few chestnut recipes that treats them as a nut rather than a stuffing. The work is all in the peeling.
- Start with the shells"Peel the raw chestnuts" means cutting through the leathery outer shell. Score an X on the flat side of each nut with a small sharp knife before you do anything else, or they will fight you.
- The scald is the hingeThe inner brown pellicle only lifts while the nut is hot and damp. Drop the shelled nuts into boiling water for a minute or two and rub the skin off a few at a time, keeping the rest in the hot water. Cold chestnuts hold their skins like glue.
- Frying pan timing"A few minutes" over moderate heat suits nuts already shelled and skinned. Reckon roughly 5 to 8 minutes, tossing, until the butter browns them lightly; a brief scald will not have cooked them through, so taste one and give them longer, or a fuller boil first, if they are still hard. Overdone, they dry out and go mealy.
- QuantityThe original gives none. Reckon about 1 lb of chestnuts in the shell for four to six people at the end of a meal, with 1 to 2 tablespoons of butter.
- Cayenne"The least sprinkle" is literal — a pinch for the whole pan. This is a Victorian savoury seasoning, meant to be noticed on the tongue and no more.
- Serve them after the cheeseThis places the dish at the very end of a formal dinner, after the cheese course. Serve warm, straight from the pan.
- PeanutsThe note at the end assumes raw peanuts, which are harder to find in general grocers than they once were; already-roasted salted peanuts will colour and catch quickly in butter. Raw shelled peanuts turn up at Indian, Asian and some Southern US grocers if you want to try it.
Chestnuts were a winter street food across Britain, France and Italy long before they were a dinner-party course, sold hot from perforated pans by braziers — the pan-and-butter method here is a genteel indoor version of the same idea. Placing them "after the cheese" is the giveaway that this book still follows the long Victorian and Edwardian dinner service, in which a small hot savoury or a dish of nuts closed the meal and bridged into the wine. The American chestnut was still a common tree when this was written; the blight that destroyed it was first identified in New York in 1904, and most chestnuts sold in the United States today are European or Asian.