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Chestnut Pudding
Take some chestnuts, and make a little incision in the skin of each one, throw them into boiling water, and let them remain until tender. Remove the shells and skins, dry them in the oven, and afterwards pound them to powder. Mix half a pound of this powder with six ounces of butter beaten to a cream, two table-spoonfuls of sifted sugar, two or three drops of the essence of vanilla, a breakfast-cupful of milk, and six well-beaten eggs. Stir these well together, then pour the mixture into a well-buttered mould, place a piece of buttered writing paper over the top, and steam for an hour and a half, or, if preferred, bake in a good oven. Serve with wine sauce. Probable cost, 1s. 3d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A steamed chestnut custard-pudding of the sort Cassell's treats as a standard sweet course. The recipe's real work is at the front end: everything depends on getting genuinely dry, finely ground chestnut before anything else happens.
- Start with more chestnuts than you thinkHalf a pound of dried chestnut powder needs roughly 1.5 to 2 lb of chestnuts in the shell, since shells, skins and moisture account for most of the weight. Ready-made chestnut flour is a direct substitute if you would rather skip the boiling and pounding.
- The skins are the hingeThe papery inner pellicle must come away with the shell while the nuts are still hot; once they cool it welds itself to the nut and turns the finished pudding bitter and gritty. Peel a few at a time, keeping the rest in the hot water.
- Drying and grinding"Dry them in the oven" means a low oven — the book gives no temperature, but something in the region of 250-275F, until the pieces are hard and no longer feel damp — otherwise they will paste rather than powder. A food processor replaces the mortar, but pulse in short bursts and sieve, as the starch and residual moisture in chestnuts will turn them to a paste if overworked.
- A breakfast-cupfulLarger than a teacup: reckon 8 to 10 fl oz, so a generous cup of milk. The batter should be thick but pourable; add the milk last and hold a little back if the chestnut flour is very fine.
- Essence of vanillaVictorian vanilla essence was generally an alcoholic extract and could be strong, so "two or three drops" may be a real amount. Modern extract, perhaps half a teaspoon, is a workable substitute.
- Buttered writing paperA greased cover to keep condensation off the pudding. Buttered parchment, or parchment under a sheet of foil, does the same job; pleat it so the pudding can rise.
- Steaming versus bakingSteam a covered mould in a pan of simmering water reaching halfway up the sides, topping up with boiling water as it falls; 90 minutes suits a mould of about two pints, which is roughly what this mixture makes. Baked, a "good oven" is unquantified in the book — a moderate oven, somewhere near 350F, is the usual modern reading — and the pudding is better set in a water bath so the six eggs do not curdle at the edges.
- Wine sauceThe period sauce is a sweetened sherry or madeira sauce, usually butter, sugar and wine warmed together, sometimes thickened with an egg yolk. It is not optional in spirit — the pudding itself is only lightly sweetened, with two tablespoons of sugar to half a pound of chestnut.
- YieldFour or five as the book says, though as a rich dessert it will stretch to six.
Chestnuts were a cheap autumn bulk food across southern Europe long before they were a luxury, and British cookery mostly met them as stuffing, as a garnish for game, or ground into puddings and creams of this kind, alongside French practice, where purée de marrons and chestnut flour were everyday things. Cassell's costing of 1s. 3d. places it among the middling sweet dishes: no expensive dried fruit, no brandy in the body of the pudding, just the labour of peeling. The steamed mould, the buttered paper cover and the wine sauce are all standard equipment of the late-Victorian pudding course.