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Chestnut Soup
Boil 1 quart chestnuts 20 minutes, then remove shells and brown inner skin, and put into saucepan with sufficient boiling water to cover them. Add piece lemon rind and 1 teaspoon salt, when soft remove rind and rub through a sieve. Then pour over them stirring all the time, 2 quarts white stock, 1/2 cup cream, 1 tablespoon Crisco rolled with 2 tablespoons flour, seasoning of salt and pepper. Bring to boiling point, remove from fire and serve hot.
A straightforward chestnut velouté thickened at the last minute with a butter-and-flour paste. The only real difficulty is the chestnuts themselves; everything after that moves quickly.
- How many chestnutsA quart measured in the shell is roughly 1 1/2 lb, which yields about 1 lb peeled, or a scant 2 cups of purée. A 15 oz jar or vacuum pack of cooked peeled chestnuts is close enough to stand in, and skips the first boiling.
- Peeling is the hingeScore an X through the shell of each nut before the 20-minute boil, and peel them a few at a time while still hot. Once they cool the brown pellicle bonds to the flesh and no amount of scraping will get it off cleanly.
- CriscoCrisco was new when this book was printed and runs through the book because Procter & Gamble published it. Use an equal amount of butter; 1 tablespoon fat rolled with 2 tablespoons flour is a beurre manié of sorts, though the classic paste is equal parts butter and flour, worked smooth with the fingers.
- Cook the thickeningWhisking raw flour paste into hot soup and taking it straight off the heat leaves a pasty taste. Let the soup hold at a bare simmer two or three minutes after it thickens, then add the cream and stop.
- White stockUnsalted or lightly salted veal or chicken stock, not browned. Modern boxed stock is usually salted, so hold back on the teaspoon of salt in the chestnut water and season only at the end.
- SievingA food mill or blender does in a minute what the original sieve did in fifteen. Pass the purée through a fine strainer afterwards if you want it truly smooth, and remember to fish out the lemon rind first.
- Don't boil after the cream"Bring to boiling point, remove from fire" means exactly that. Chestnut purée is starchy and will catch on the pan bottom, and hard boiling after the cream goes in can break it.
- YieldAbout 2 1/2 quarts finished, which is eight to ten first-course servings. Thin with more stock if it stiffens on standing, as it will.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble in the mid-1910s to promote Crisco, then only a few years old; the recipes are conventional American and Anglo-French cookery with the new hydrogenated shortening slotted in wherever butter or lard would have gone. Chestnut soup itself is older and thoroughly European — a purée-thickened potage of the kind French cookery classifies by its base rather than its stock, and a standard autumn and Christmas first course in France, Italy and the German-speaking countries, where chestnuts were a staple starch in upland regions long before they were a luxury. The lemon rind is a common old trick against the flat sweetness of chestnut.