Home › Preserving › French Chestnuts Brandied
French Chestnuts Brandied
Prepare the chestnuts by the recipe for vanilla chestnut preserves, except, instead of filling the jar with syrup, leave room for about one half a cup of French brandy.
Vanilla Chestnuts Glacé Remove the chestnuts from the syrup, wipe each with a cloth, and let dry an hour or more.
Drop each nut gently into syrup cooked for the purpose, then lift with a candy fork and drop on to a tin or aluminum sheet.
Sugar Syrup for Nuts and Fruit Glacé! 2 cups granulated sugar 1 tablespoonful glucose 1 cup water Stir until the sugar is dissolved, then wash down the sides of the saucepan, cover and let boil three minutes; then remove the cover and let boil to 295° F. on the sugar thermometer.
Set the saucepan into a dish of boiling water and use at once. White grapes are one of the most successful articles to use glacé. Use only perfect grapes and retain a bit of each stem.
Fruit from which the juice will flow can not be used for this purpose. Grapes Glacé should be eaten the day on which they are prepared; nuts may be kept.
Two separate procedures are folded into one entry: a brandied chestnut preserve packed in sealed jars, and a hard-crack sugar coating for nuts and grapes. The second is straightforward confectionery; the first is a low-acid preserve whose base recipe is not reproduced here, and it should not be attempted from this page.
- Why the brandied jars failWhy the brandied jars are a risk -- Chestnuts are a low-acid food, sitting around pH 6, and this page tells you only to leave room in the jar for about half a cup of brandy: it gives no processing time, no temperature and no headspace, and whatever the base preserve recipe specifies is not reproduced here. A low-acid food packed in a sealed jar without a verified heat process is the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum, and sugar and alcohol at these proportions cannot be assumed to prevent it.
- The brandy is not a preservative hereHalf a cup of spirit diluted into a jar of syrup and nuts will almost certainly fall well below the roughly 18–20 percent alcohol by volume usually cited as the point at which spirits begin to inhibit bacterial growth, though the page gives no jar size or syrup quantity to calculate from. Traditional brandied fruits generally use far more spirit relative to the pack. Use a current, tested recipe if you want preserved chestnuts.
- The base recipe is missingEverything about the brandied version — how long the chestnuts cook, the syrup density, whether the jars are heat-processed — lives in the vanilla chestnut preserve recipe elsewhere in the book. Working from this page alone means guessing at the part that matters.
- GlucoseThe tablespoon of glucose is an interfering agent that keeps the syrup from crystallising. Light corn syrup is the direct modern substitute in the same quantity.
- 295°FThat is the bottom of the hard-crack range, still some way below caramelisation. A digital thermometer is more reliable than an old-style sugar thermometer, and the syrup will climb a few degrees after it comes off the heat, so pull it a touch early.
- The boiling-water bathSetting the pan into a dish of boiling water holds the syrup fluid without cooking it further. Without it the syrup stiffens as it cools and the coating turns thick and dull.
- HumidityHard-crack sugar draws moisture from the air and goes sticky. Glacé work wants a dry day, and the coated nuts should be stored airtight with no refrigeration.
- GrapesThe instruction to leave a stub of stem and reject any fruit whose juice will flow is the whole technique: leaking juice dissolves the coating from beneath. The recipe's same-day warning follows from this, since the coating will not survive long on a moist fruit.
Chestnuts candied in syrup are a French confection above all — marrons glacés, generally traced to the chestnut country of the Ardèche and the Lyonnais, where the nut was a staple long before it was a luxury, and where the labour of peeling, poaching and repeatedly steeping in ever-heavier syrup made the finished sweet an expensive Christmas item. American preserving manuals of the early twentieth century, of which this is one, tended to present the French sweets as an accomplishment for the ambitious home cook, alongside the plainer business of jam and jelly. The brandied variant belongs to a different and older household habit: fruit put down in spirit, a practice that predates reliable canning and survived beside it for decades.