Home › A Calendar of Dinners › Chestnut Dainty
Chestnut Dainty
Boil 1 pound of Italian chestnuts 15 minutes; then remove shells and skins, and put back to boil until tender, with 1 cup of milk and 1 teaspoon Crisco, on the back part of range until soft enough to rub through a sieve. Crisco a mold well and line thickly with pulp, then add layer of apple sauce colored pink with currant jelly; then another layer chestnuts and again a layer of apple sauce. Over this squeeze some lemon juice, and bake in quick oven. Turn out on platter, and surround with whipped cream, colored with little currant jelly.
A chestnut-and-applesauce mold from one of Procter & Gamble's Crisco cookbooks. It contains no eggs despite its placement in the egg chapter, which means the only thing holding it together is thick purée — the hinge of the dish is getting the chestnut mash dry and stiff enough to unmold.
- CriscoPlain vegetable shortening; the book exists to sell it. Butter works identically here and tastes better in a dessert.
- Italian chestnutsLarge sweet chestnuts (marrons), then a common import. A pound in the shell yields roughly 10 to 12 ounces of peeled nut. Vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts, about 12 oz, save the peeling and go straight to the milk stage.
- PeelingThe 15-minute boil is only to loosen shell and inner skin. Peel while genuinely hot — the papery pellicle welds itself on as the nuts cool, so work in small batches and keep the rest in the water.
- "Back part of range"The cool end of a coal range: a bare simmer. On a modern burner use the lowest setting and stir, since 1 cup of milk over direct heat scorches quickly. Expect 20 to 30 minutes until the nuts crush under a spoon.
- Through a sieveA potato ricer or food mill is faster and gives the right texture. A food processor turns chestnut into glue. Cook the purée down further if it is at all loose; a wet purée will collapse when turned out.
- Apple sauceUse a thick, unsweetened or lightly sweetened sauce and drain off any free liquid. Currant jelly is the colouring here -- a tablespoon stirred in warm gives the pink and a little tartness.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400 to 425F. In a well-greased mold of about a quart it should need only 25 to 30 minutes, long enough to set the layers and dry the surface, not to brown it.
- UnmoldingLet it stand 10 minutes off the heat before inverting, and run a thin knife around the edge. Since nothing binds it but starch, a shallow ring or charlotte mold turns out far more reliably than a fluted one.
- YieldProbably serves four to six as a dessert.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil, cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, for Procter & Gamble, which had introduced Crisco in 1911 and needed to show American cooks what to do with a hydrogenated vegetable fat in a kitchen that ran on butter and lard. That accounts for the teaspoon of shortening in the milk and the greased mold: the recipes name the product throughout. The dish itself belongs to the European tradition of sweetened chestnut purée -- the same tradition behind crème de marrons and Mont Blanc -- which reached American tables largely through imported Italian chestnuts, sold by the pound each autumn and valued for their size. By the 1910s the American chestnut was already being destroyed by blight, so the specification of "Italian" may have been practical rather than snobbish. If the recipe is filed under Eggs, that is likely an artefact of the book's chapter arrangement rather than any egg in the formula.