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Chestnut Sauce, Brown
Prepare the chestnuts as in the following recipe, but instead of adding cream or milk to the paste, mix them with a little good brown gravy, and season the sauce rather highly. Time to roast the chestnuts, according to the quality. Probable cost, 2d. or 3d. per pint. Sufficient for one roast fowl.
A terse cross-referenced entry: the work is all in the chestnuts, and the sauce is simply their paste let down with gravy instead of milk. A few things need translating.
- The hinge: get the skins off completelyChestnuts have an outer shell and a bitter inner pellicle, and the pellicle only peels cleanly while the nuts are hot. Score each one, roast or boil, and peel a few at a time keeping the rest warm; a single patch of skin left on will turn the sauce astringent.
- "Prepare the chestnuts as in the following recipe"The companion entry is the plain or white chestnut sauce, whose paste is thinned with cream or milk; on the evidence of this cross-reference, everything up to the thinning is the same here.
- Roasting timeThe original declines to give one, and it depends on size. In a modern oven at around 425F, scored chestnuts take roughly 20-30 minutes; scoring and simmering them in water for 15-20 minutes, then peeling, gives a softer nut that purees more easily and is the better route for a sauce.
- "Good brown gravy"Not the packet product. In period cookery this means a reduced brown meat stock or gravy from the roast rather than a thickened powder mix. Pan juices from the fowl itself, deglazed and strained, are closest to the intent.
- Seasoned "rather highly"Chestnut puree is bland and starchy and mutes salt. Expect to season past the point that seems right in the spoon; a little pepper, mace or a spoon of Madeira all sit well against roast poultry.
- TextureA food processor gives a grainy result on its own. Puree, then push through a fine sieve, and add the gravy gradually to a pouring consistency; the paste thickens as it cools and may need loosening again before serving.
- Quantity and yieldThe price is quoted per pint, and "sufficient for one roast fowl" suggests a modest quantity, perhaps in the region of a pint (about 570 ml). Around 1 lb of chestnuts in the shell yields roughly 12 oz peeled.
- Vacuum-packed chestnutsCooked, peeled chestnuts sold in jars or pouches are a legitimate substitute and remove the whole peeling problem. Warm them through in a little of the gravy before pureeing.
- The costing2d. or 3d. per pint is Victorian pence and tells you only that chestnuts were cheap. It is a period detail, not a guide.
Cassell's runs chestnut sauce in two forms, white and brown, perhaps on the assumption that a Victorian household roasting a fowl would want one or the other. The pairing of chestnuts with poultry is long established in both French and English cooking, where sauce aux marrons and chestnut stuffing served the same purpose: bulking out and enriching a lean bird with a starchy, faintly sweet nut. Sweet chestnuts were genuinely cheap in nineteenth-century Britain, sold roasted on winter streets, which is why the entry can quote a price of twopence or threepence a pint without comment. The brown version, thinned with meat gravy rather than cream, belongs to the same household logic as the rest of this section: the roast produces juices, and nothing that came out of the pan is wasted.