Home › A Calendar of Dinners › Chestnut Boulettes
Chestnut Boulettes
Mix together in a basin 1 cup mashed chestnuts, which have been peeled after cooking in boiling salted water, beat into this 1 tablespoon whipped cream, 1/2 tablespoon Crisco, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 2 egg yolks, 1 tablespoon sugar, 1 teaspoon sherry wine. Cool and fold in beaten egg whites, form into small balls, dip in beaten egg, toss in crumbs and fry in hot Crisco. Drain and serve.
A croquette in all but name: sweetened chestnut purée bound with egg, crumbed and deep-fried. The mixture is soft, so temperature control at both ends — chilling and frying — decides whether the balls hold.
- Chill it properly"Cool" is doing a lot of work here. Refrigerate the purée at least an hour, and again after shaping, or the boulettes slump the moment they hit the fat.
- The chestnutsAbout 1 lb of fresh chestnuts in the shell yields the cup of mash called for. Score the flat side, boil 20–25 minutes, and peel while hot — both the shell and the inner brown pellicle come away only while warm. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts or unsweetened chestnut purée substitute directly.
- CriscoIntroduced in 1911 and named throughout this book because the book was published to sell it. Any solid vegetable shortening works for the half tablespoon in the mixture; butter is better tasting. For frying, use a neutral oil with a high smoke point.
- Frying temperatureThe book only says "hot". Period frying guides commonly gauged fat by how fast a bread cube browned — about 40 seconds for an already-cooked mixture, which corresponds to roughly 365–375°F. Cooler and the coating drinks fat and the ball disintegrates; hotter and the crumbs darken before the inside warms.
- One tablespoon of whipped creamNot a typo. Whip a couple of tablespoons of heavy cream and measure a spoonful of the foam; it lightens the purée without loosening it the way liquid cream would.
- Folding the whitesThe recipe doesn't say how many whites; the two left over from the yolks is the obvious reading, and that is a lot of air for a stiff base. Slacken the purée with a spoonful of white first, then fold the rest in two additions.
- CrumbsDry fine breadcrumbs, not panko, for a smooth period finish. Crumb, chill, and crumb a second time if any purée shows through — a gap in the coating is where the boulette bursts.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; a cup of purée should make roughly sixteen walnut-sized balls, enough for about four. Sweet and eggy, they would suit a place beside roast game or poultry, or dusted with sugar as a small dessert fritter.
Boulette is simply French for a little ball, the word used for the small fried forcemeat and purée balls that appeared on nineteenth-century French menus; English cookbooks sometimes treated it as interchangeable with "croquette". Chestnuts were a natural filling: cheap, floury and abundant in autumn. This particular version comes from A Calendar of Dinners, one of the recipe books Marion Harris Neil wrote for Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco after its 1911 launch, which is why a shortening appears where an older French recipe would have said butter or lard, and why it is named twice in four lines.